THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE
MODERN HISTORY
V.
THE ASCENDANCY
OF FRANCE,
1648-88
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY
ADVISORY COMMITTEE
G.N.CLARK J.R.M.BUTLER I.P.T.BURY
THE LATE E.A.BENIANS
VOLUME V
THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
1648-88
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE MODERN
HISTORY
VOLUME V
THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
1648-88
EDITED BY
F. L. CARSTEN
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1961
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PUBLISHED BY
THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W. 1
American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York 22, N.Y.
West African Office: P.O. Box 33, Ibadan, Nigeria
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1961
Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge
( Brooke Crutchley, University Printer )
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
PREFACE
The first eight chapters in this volume are devoted to the more general
aspects of European history in the second half of the seventeenth century.
They are followed by nine chapters on the countries of western Europe —
France, the United Provinces, Britain, Spain, and Portugal — with their
possessions in America and Asia and the contacts which existed between
Europe and other continents. The final eight chapters describe the countries
of central, south-eastern, north-eastern and eastern Europe, a world very
different from that of the West where trade and enterprise were developing
fast during this period. The volume covers the years from 1648 to 1688;
but it has not always been possible to adhere strictly to these dates,
especially where they do not mark a well-defined period. In the chapters
on France and on Britain, as well as in the chapter on Europe and North
America, it has been found more logical to leave the description of the
disturbances of the Fronde and of the Interregnum to volume iv and to
start this volume with the personal rule of Louis XIV and the restoration
of Charles II. Several other chapters begin with the accession of a new
ruler or end with the death of a king, thus transgressing to some extent
into the period before 1648 or after 1688 : thus the chapter on Scandinavia
extends to the death of Charles XI of Sweden, and that on Poland to the
death of King John Sobieski. The chapters on Philosophy, Political
Thought, Art and Architecture, Europe and Asia, the Empire after the
Thirty Years War, and the Rise of Brandenburg cover the years from
1648 to 1715, the periods of volumes v and vi, because it has been found
more convenient to treat both together. Some other aspects of the period,
such as music, will be discussed in volume vi.
The editor wishes to express his gratitude to those of his colleagues in
the University of London who have undertaken the arduous task of
translation which, in many cases, has also meant adaptation and inter-
pretation : to Dr J. F. Bosher of King’s College who has translated the
chapter on French Diplomacy and Foreign Policy; to Mr A. D. Deyer-
mond of Westfield College who has translated the chapters on Spain and
on Portugal ; to Dr Ragnhild Hatton of the London School of Economics
and Political Science who has translated the chapter on Scandinavia; to
Dr J. L. H. Keep of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies
who has translated the chapters on Poland and on Russia; to Mr W.
Pickles of the London School of Economics and Political Science who
has translated the chapter on Political Thought ; and to Mrs P. Waley of
Westfield College who has translated the chapter on Italy. The editor’s
greatest debt of gratitude is due to his wife who has assisted him through-
out in the work of editing, comparing and checking the contributions of
so many historians.
WESTFIELD COLLEGE, LONDON F.L.C.
March 1960
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV
By F. L. Carsten
Reader in Modern History, Westfield College, University of London
page I
CHAPTER II
ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND POLICIES
By D. C. Coleman, Reader in Economic History at the London School
of Economics
Population trends in Europe in second half of seventeenth century ... 19
Plague as an agent of death 20
War as an agent of death, direct and indirect 20
Losses incurred during and after Thirty Years War 20-1
Crop failure and famine 21-2
Fluctuation of population 22
Areas of population loss and economic decline 22
Areas of population growth and economic development 22-3
Advance in agricultural techniques; agricultural literature in England . . 23-4
Trade in foodstuffs 24
Trends in com prices 24-5
Landlords and tenants 25
Decline in industry and trade of Italy, Spain, and Spanish Netherlands . . 26
Effects of war on the economy of the Empire 26-7
Industry and trade of Sweden 27
Expansion of English and French trade 27-8
Import into Europe of Indian and American goods 28
Trading companies and the struggle for colonial trade 28-9
Domestic industries; occasional giant enterprises 29
Financial dealings, great and small 19-30
Problems of public finance; diversity of solutions 30
Colbert and the faille; the monthly assessment and hearth-tax in England . . 30-1
Indirect taxes 31
Dutch taxation system 31-2
New indirect taxation in various countries ; the excise 32
Sale of offices and farming of taxes 32-3
Systems of public borrowing 33-4
Money shortages; increased use of credit transactions and non-precious coinage
metals 34-5
Control of flow of precious metals across frontiers 35
Struggle for international trade; the English Navigation Acts .... 35-6
Creation of French trading companies 36-7
Commercial treaties 37-8
Tariffs and trade embargoes as instruments of Colbert’s economic policy; Anglo-
French rivalry 38-9
Luxury manufactures in France 39-40
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Colbert’s development of textile and other industries page 40-1
Promotion of industry and trade elsewhere in Europe 41
Social policy; poor relief and repression of vagrants 41-2
Control of trade in foodstuffs 42-3
Mercantilism 43-4
Writings on economic matters 45
Colbert as the embodiment of mercantilist policy 45-6
CHAPTER III
THE SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT
By A. R. Hall, Professor of the History of Science , University of California
Pre-emininence of French science; the age of Cartesianism 47-8
Beginnings of the Royal Society; influence of Descartes 48
Italian science after Galileo; the Accademia del Cimento 49
Character of early scientific societies 49
Early activities of the Royal Society; different character of Acadentie Royale des
Sciences 50-1
Intercommunication between European scientists 51-2
Replacement of the old conception of the natural order; Newton’s Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica 52-3
Neglect of exact astronomical geometry by Galileo and Descartes ; development of
telescopes 53-4
Difficulties of formulating a theory of planetary motions in mathematical terms . 54
Huygen’s work in dynamics 55
Kepler’s laws: slow realisation of their significance 55
Newton’s work; his status as a mechanical philosopher 55-7
Acceptance by English scientists of basic tenets of Cartesian science . . . 57-8
Boyle’s scepticism concerning some Cartesian conceptions ; his theory of chemistry 58-60
Theories of combustion 60
Theories of light and the formation of colour 60-2
Cartesian and Newtonian mechanism 63-5
Extension of mechanistic theory to physiology 65-6
Study of respiration and other biological questions 66
Zoological experiment; concept of immutability of species 67-8
Microscopy 68-70
Problems of taxonomy; the work of John Ray 70-1
Biological and physical aspects of seventeenth-century science .... 71-2
CHAPTER IV
PHILOSOPHY
By W. von Leyden, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in the Durham Colleges,
University of Durham
Close links between philosophical and scientific thought in seventeenth century . 73
Extension of the mathematical method from science to other fields of study, parti-
cularly philosophy 73-4
Dominance of Cartesian philosophy; the Meditations and the Objections thereto 74-5
Basis of Descartes’s philosophy; his arguments for the existence of God; his
physical theory 75-7
Ecclesiastical opposition to Descartes; attitude of Pascal 77-8
Malebranche: his version of Cartesian theory, his doctrine and influence . . 78-9
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Varieties of Cartesianism, and rival systems page 79
Spinoza, the ‘God-intoxicated man’ 79-80
His notion of substance; his ethics 80-1
Leibniz: his conception of ‘monadism’ 82-3
His principles of sufficient reason and of the identity of indiscemibles . . 83-4
His system of logic; influence of Essais de Theodicee ; his legacy to later philo-
sophers 85-6
Controversy between metaphysical rationalism and empiricism .... 86
Gassendi : a forerunner of the British Empiricists ; his Syntagma Philosophicum 86-7
His doctrines and influence 87-8
Bacon: importance of his general conception of ‘advancement of learning’ . . 88
Hobbes: empiricist, materialist, and rationalist 88-90
The Cambridge Platonists 90-1
Locke: his study of the nature, origin, and extent of knowledge .... 91-4
Chief characteristics of philosophy in the period from Descartes to Locke . . 94-5
CHAPTER V
POLITICAL THOUGHT
By Stephan Skalweit, Professor of Modern History in the University of
Saarbriicken
Essential features of seventeenth-century thought 9 6
Basic political attitudes: doctrine of Divine Right and theory of social contract
based on reason 9b
The monarchy of Louis XIV 97
Memo ires of Louis XIV ; the concept of absolute monarchy .... 97-9
Bossuet : the biblical basis of his Politique tiree des propres paroles de V Ecriture
sainte 99-100
Possible influence of Hobbes on Bossuet too
Bossuet’s distinction between gouvernement absolu and gouvernement arbitraire . 101
Intellectual contradictions in the Politique ; confusion between legality and tradi-
tion 101-2
Principle of the sovereignty of the people foreshadowed 102
England’s constitutional conflict 102-3
Hobbes’s Leviathan ; his theory on the creation and function of the State; his nega-
tion of divine consecration 103-4
Revival in Restoration England of doctrine of Divine Right; Filmer’s Patriarcha 104-6
Spinoza: similarities and differences between his thought and that of Hobbes . 106-7
Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus; theory on the origin of the State and the
nature of sovereignty 107-8
Modification of theory in Tractatus politicus 108-9
Progress towards alliance between political theory and political experience . . 109-10
Concept of secularised natural law in the German principalities . . . . no
Pufendorf : his approach to the connection between natural law and power of the
State 1 10-12
Problem of relationship between the Empire and the autonomous principalities;
Pufendorf’s De Statu Imperii Germanici 1 12-13
Pufendorf as the embodiment of the contemporary trends of political thought . 1 13-14
Leibniz; the incomplete expression of his political thought 1 14-15
National and universal trends in Leibniz’s philosophy 115-16
The ‘irenic’ campaign for the reunion of Christendom 116-17
Leibniz’s recognition of the breach between Christianity and modem science . 1 17
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Emergence of concept of the ‘ natural’ right of the individual and of the sovereignty
of the people page 1 17-19
Coincidence of Locke’s Treatises on Civil Government and the Glorious Revolution 1 1 9
Harmony between Locke’s political theory and the temper of his time . . 119-20
Locke’s conception of the English constitution; his influence in the eighteenth
century 120-1
CHAPTER VI
CHURCH AND STATE
By Anne Whiteman, Fellow and Tutor of Lady Margaret Hall and
Lecturer in Modern History in the University of Oxford
Continuation of religious division after Peace of Westphalia . . . 122
Growth of absolutism ; the Church regarded as a department of State . 122-3
Plans for reuniting the divided Church 123
Conflict between ambitions of secular rulers and intense religious life . . . 124
Varying strength of religious forces 124
Effect of the Treaty of Osnabriick in Germany 124-6
Variety of problems of Church and State within Germany 126-7
Political leadership of Protestants and Catholics in Germany . . . 127
Limitation of wealth and power of the Spanish Church despite religious fervour 127-9
Relations of Spanish governments with the papacy 129
Political crises and the Portuguese Church 129-30
Difficulties between Venice and the papacy 130
Variety of conflicts between Church and State in France 130
Different interpretations of Gallicanism 131
Non-Gallican persuasions : the Jesuits and Mendicants ; centres for spiritual reform
and their devots 1 3 1-2
Publication of Augustinus; Jansenism 132-3
Censure of the Five Propositions and drawing up of formulary against Jansenist
tenets 133-4
Louis XIV enlists papal aid to enforce subscription of the formulary . . . 134
The conflict over the regale temporelle and regale spirituelle . . . . 135
Revival of Louis’s hostility to Jansenism; growing enmity with Innocent XI . 135-6
General Assembly summoned by Louis; the Four Articles; Innocent XI’s brief
on the rigale 136-7
Reactions in France and in Rome to the Four Articles 137
Affair of the Franchises; excommunication of Lavardin; Louis’s invasion of
Avignon 138
Death of Innocent XI; conciliatory moves under Alexander VIII; compromise
under Innocent XII 138-9
The Huguenots before Louis’s personal government 139
Restriction of Protestant privileges; destruction of churches .... 139-40
Establishment of Caisse des Conversions 140
Louis’s policy of persecution 140
Acts against the Huguenots; Edict of Fontainebleau 141
Revulsion in Europe against Louis’s policy 142
Church and State in the Protestant countries of Western Europe . . . 142
Religious tolerance in the United Provinces 142-3
Re-establishment of Anglicanism in England after the Restoration ... 143
Measures against Nonconformists 144
Anti-Catholic policy despite Charles ITs Catholic sympathies .... 144
Resistance to episcopacy in Scotland 144-5
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Movement for reunion of Churches; efforts of Leibniz, Bossuet, and Spinola page 145-6
Theoretical and practical arguments for religious toleration .... 146-7
Reaction against formalism and exclusiveness of established Churches; decline of
State responsibility for Church *47-8
CHAPTER VII
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
By R. Witt ico wer, Professor of the History of Art, Columbia University
Rome as the centre of Baroque art; artists of first, second, and third generations of
Baroque 149
Decline of Rome as Europe's artistic metropolis; increase of artistic activity in
Venice, Genoa, Piedmont, and Naples 150
Challenge of Paris; Bernini’s abortive visit in connection with his design for the
Louvre 150-1
Seventeenth-century trends : Baroque, classicism, and realism .... 151-2
Bernini, Poussin, and Rembrandt as representatives of Baroque, classicism, and
realism 152-3
Emergence of ‘Baroque classicism’ 153-4
Baroque frescoes after 1650; work of Gaulli and Pozzo 154
Maratti’s reconciliation of Baroque and classical trends 154-5
Italian individualists 155
The Bernini school of sculpture 155-6
French influence on Roman sculpture 156
Rome as the international centre for sculpture 156
Bernini’s blending of sculpture and architecture 156-7
His revolutionary type of palace design; the piazza of St Peter’s . . . 157
Works of Borromini and Cortona 157-8
Influence of Bernini, Borromini, and Cortona on architectural history . . 158-9
Rainaldi and Guarini 159-60
French artists of the pre-Louis XIV era 160-1
Colbert’s control of French artistic activity; the Academies .... 161
Bellori’s theory and Poussin's method as basis of later seventeenth-century art . 162
Le style Louis XIV 162-3
Garden- and town-planning 163-4
Resurgence of French sculpture: Girardon, Coysevox, and Puget . . . 164-5
Contrast between art of Spanish Netherlands and that of Holland . . . 165
Great specialisation in various branches of painting 166
Limitations imposed by style; development of Pieter de Hooch and others . . 167-8
Sculpture and architecture in the Netherlands 168-9
The arts in post- Restoration England 169
Dominance of Sir Christopher Wren 169-70
Sir Roger Pratt, Hugh May, and later English architects 170-1
Lack of distinction among English sculptors 171
Concentration on portraiture 171
Foreign painters in England 171
Slow recuperation of the arts in Germany and Austria after Thirty Years War . 172
Italian influence, and native contribution, in revival of sculpture and architecture
in Germany and Austria 172-3
Decline of Spanish painting in second half of seventeenth century . . . 173-4
Late Baroque architecture in Spain 174
Reaction against the international classicism imposed by French Academy, led by
Roger de Piles 174-5
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CHAPTER VIII
THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF STATES
By Sir George Clark, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Europe’s ‘military revolution’ page 176
Increased size of armies and fleets, absorbing larger proportions of population 176
Demographic situation and the causation of wars 176-8
Factors of change in the military revolution; the scientific movement 178
Social effects of the scientific movement and technology 178-9
Mathematical knowledge applied to administration: de Witt’s reform of life-
annuities 179
Work of Edmund Halley and Sir William Petty; comprehensive and systematic
collection of facts . 179-80
Social enquiry by survey in England and France 180-1
Louis XIV’s part in the work of government 181-2
Removal of the court to Versailles; apparatus of the French monarchy 182-3
The French nobility, a status of privilege; the noblesse d'epee . 183
Connection between nobility and Church 183-4
The noblesse de robe 1 84-5
Development of the bourgeoisie ; detrimental effects of privilege and status-seeking 1 85-6
Division of French society into privileged and unprivileged . . . . 186
Lack of communication between central government and the individual 1 86-7
Widespread adoption of methods of Louis XIV’s monarchy . 187
Differences between French and English governmental systems illustrated in the
colonies . 187
Relations of England with Ireland and Scotland 187-8
Deficiency of machinery of government in England 1 88-9
The English nobility 189-90
Position of the Church 190
Independent local government in and outside towns 190-1
Development of the professions; their place in the social structure . 191-2
Social organisation in the Dutch Republic; its influence 192-3
Freedom of thought, literacy, and public spirit in the Dutch Republic 193-4
Difference in status of peasantry in eastern and western Europe .... 194-5
German administrative practice; legal training of officials 195-6
Centralised government in the German principalities 196
Brandenburg-Prussia; the Great Elector’s administration 196-7
CHAPTER IX
FRENCH DIPLOMACY AND FOREIGN POLICY
IN THEIR EUROPEAN SETTING
By G. Zeller, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the Sorbonne
Establishment of permanent embassies 198
Louis XIV’s representatives 198-9
His foreign policy; role of subsidies paid to friends and allies .... 199-200
The idea of an international balance 200
Beginnings of international law; Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pads ... 201
Naval warfare and practices 201
Preoccupation of France, Holland, and England with question of the naval salute 201-2
Relations with the Spanish fleet 202
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Regulations regarding the salute; incidents with the Genoese . . . page 202-3
Relations with Ottoman Empire and Barbary States; eventual relaxation of
protocol 203
Notion of coastal and adjacent waters in early maritime law .... 203
Solutions to other international problems arising in wartime .... 203-4
Institution of the consulate 204-5
Institution of neutrality 205-6
Decline of Latin as language of diplomacy 206
Opinions on the central idea of Louis XIV’s foreign policy 206-7
Louis’s preoccupation with la gloire\ his mistaken choice of diplomats and dis-
regard of propaganda 207-8
Mazarin’s diplomacy ; peace with Spain and the recovery of Dunkirk . . . 208-9
Louis’s assumption of control; Treaty of Montmartre with Charles of Lorraine . 209-10
Humiliations inflicted by Louis on the Spanish government and the papal curia . 210
Question of Devolution; speculation on the Spanish succession . . . 210
Louis XIV’s diplomatic preparations for War of Devolution .... 210-n
Louis’s invasion of Spanish Netherlands; John de Witt’s attempt at mediation . 212
Triple alliance between England, United Provinces, and Sweden . . . 212-13
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle 213
Commercial war between French and Dutch 213-14
Attitude of Louis towards administration of other countries .... 214
Invasion of United Provinces 215
Growth of German hostility to French expansion; activities of Archbishop of
Mainz 216-17
Early French successes in Franco-Dutch war 217
Growth of anti-French coalition; Anglo-Dutch peace 217-18
Peace negotiations and Treaty of Nymegen 218-19
The Reunions 219-20
Turkish threat to Vienna; John Sobieski’s intervention; Truce of Ratisbon . 220
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; the League of Augsburg . . . . 221
Position of France in mid-reign of Louis XIV 221
CHAPTER X
FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XIV
By J. Lough, Professor of French in the Durham Colleges,
University of Durham
The state of France during Louis XIV’s minority 222
Louis’s retention of Lionne, Le Tellier, and Fouquet on his assumption of control 222-3
Contrast between military glory and economic depression 223-4
Division of French society into noblemen and roturiers 224-5
Extremes of wealth and poverty among clergy 225
Contrasts of wealth and status among nobility ; noblesse d'epee and noblesse de
robe 225-6
Social prestige and acquisition of offices 226
Intermarriage between nobility and financiers 226-7
Economic consequences of the sale of offices 227-8
Organisation of trade and industry 228-9
Population in town and country 229
Ownership of land by peasants, clergy, and nobility 229-30
Rent of land ; prosperity and poverty among peasants 230
Feudal dues and taxes burdening peasants 230-1
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Additional burden of primitive agricultural methods and hazards of crop failure page 231-2
Peasant revolts 232-3
Personality of Louis XIV 233-4
His relations with his ministers ; his personal government in theory and practice 235
Gradual establishment of a centralised bureaucracy 235-6
Function of the intendants 236
Estates General and Parlements deprived of authority, but not abolished . . 236-7
Diminished authority of governors of provinces 237
Local government in towns 237
Curtailment of privileges of pays d’etats 237-8
Absolute monarchy established 238-9
Independence of Church curtailed 239
Transformation of noblesse d'epee 239
Total dependence of nobility on the king; competition for rewards of assiduity and
obedience 239-40
Colbert’s direction of finance and economics 240-1
His ‘mercantilist theories’ 241
His efforts to restore the financial situation 241-2
His attempts to reorganise and expand industry 242-3
His use of tariffs 243
His setting up of trading companies 243-4
His achievements 244
Louis XI V’s absolutism: a break with the tradition of government . 244
Absence of essential change in French society 245
Extravagant official praise of Louis; hidden discontent 245-6
Supremacy of France in Europe during Louis’s reign; Louis in mid-reign . . 246-7
CHAPTER XI
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF FRANCE IN ART, THOUGHT
AND LITERATURE
By David Ogg, Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford
Literary florescence in first half of Louis XIV’s reign 248
Centralised control of art; exemption of the drama from supervision . . . 249
Creation of Versailles 249-50
Influence of Versailles; currents in French painting 250-1
Influences derived from Montaigne, Descartes, and Jansenism .... 251-2
Pascal’s Pensees 253
The spoken word ; 1 ' esprit 253
Women’s influence in society ; the salons 253-4
The philosophes 254
Enrichment and expansion of the French language; French replacing Latin as
international language 254-6
Molifere 256-8
Racine 258-60
Bossuet 260-1
Boileau 262-3
Ballet de cour developing into opera 264
La Rochefoucauld 264
La Fontaine 265-8
Madame de S6vign6 268-9
Fenelon 269-70
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Transition from imaginative achievement to criticism of the regime . . page 270-1
Feminine influence during early years of Louis’s reign 271
Antagonism to Louis in Europe 271
Exception of Restoration England: influence of Charles II 271-2
French influence on English literary criticism 272
Compromise between French and English genius : Dryden 272-3
CHAPTER XII
THE DUTCH REPUBLIC
By E. H. Kossmann, Reader in Dutch History and Institutions in the
University of London
Second half of seventeenth century a period of consolidation rather than change 275
Fundamental differences between the provinces ; social structure of Holland . 275
The Dutch bourgeoisie 276
Sale of public offices; different origin of the practice in Holland and France . 276
Composition and function of the States General and of the States . . . 276-7
Offices of Grand Pensionary and Stadholder; position of House of Orange . 277
Tension between States of Holland and Stadholder 277-8
Government after death of William II 278-9
Regime of John de Witt 279
Wide support of republican regime by religious sects 279-80
Diversity of religious faiths in Protestant Dutch Republic 280
Complex religious divisions a cause of impermanence of governments . . 280
Various elements in opposition to the regime 280-1
Growing influence of Orangist regents 281
Coincidence of de Witt’s regime and slowing down of economic development . 281-2
Questions of England and House of Orange as causes of de Witt’s fall . . 282-3
Anglo-Dutch economic hostility; first Anglo-Dutch War 283-4
Act of Seclusion; Peace of Westminster (1654) 285
Consolidation of de Witt’s party; influence in other provinces .... 285-6
His foreign policy 286-7
Franco-Dutch alliance 287-8
Second Anglo-Dutch War; Treaty of Breda 288-9
Triple Alliance 289
Repeal of Act of Seclusion 290
De Witt’s plan for education of William III by States of Holland . . . 290-1
The Eternal Edict 291
Zenith of de Witt’s power; beginnings of decline 291
Dutch ignorance of foreign hostility 291
Anti-Dutch feeling expressed in Treaty of Dover 292
Attack on Dutch Republic by England and France 292
William III elected captain-general for one campaign only 292-3
Louis XI V’s headquarters at Utrecht ; submission or occupation of other provinces 293
Roman Catholic emancipation 293
Orangist assault upon de Witt; States of Holland negotiating with France . . 293
Revocation of Eternal Edict ; William proclaimed Stadholder of Holland, captain-
general and admiral-general 294
Negotiations with France broken off; resignation and assassination of de Witt . 294
‘Wittian’ regents replaced by Orangists; end of popular disturbances . . 294-5
French withdrawal; Anglo-Dutch Peace of Westminster (1674) .... 295
Marriage of William III; Anglo-Dutch defensive alliance (1678) .... 296
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Negotiations at Nymegen; separate peace between Dutch and France opposed by
William III page 296
William’s attitude to Franco-Spanish war of 1683; Truce of Ratisbon 297
Anti-French coalition after Revocation of Edict of Nantes 297
William Ill’s departure for England (1688) 297-8
William’s policy after 1674 298-9
Degeneration under William of oligarchic practices used by de Witt . . . 299
Decline, after 1680, of the inspiration of Dutch civilisation .... 300
CHAPTER XIII
BRITAIN AFTER THE RESTORATION
By David Ogg
France and England at the beginning and end of an era of personal monarchy 301
Events leading to proclamation of Charles II as king 301-2
Attitudes and expectations attending Restoration 302
Parliament’s failure to impose conditions on Charles 302-3
Provision for Charles’s revenue; causes of his later financial independence . . 303-4
Abolition of Court of Wards; powerful position of landed freeholders after 1660 304
Legislation to bridge gap between interregnum and monarchy .... 304-5
The Cavalier Parliament; the Corporation Act; the Act of Uniformity 305-6
Penalisation of Dissenters; the Clarendon Code 306
Coronation and marriage of Charles 306-7
Restoration settlement in Ireland; difficulties of land settlement . . 308
Harshness of Stuart rule in Scotland 308-9
Relations between Charles and Louis XIV ; diplomatic difficulties of second Anglo-
Dutch War; Secret Treaty of Dover 309-10
Declaration of Indulgence; third Anglo-Dutch War 31 1
Marriage of James, Duke of York, and Mary of Modena 31 1-12
Provisions of Test Acts . . . 312
Growing public suspicion of Catholicism; unpopularity of Duke of York . . 312-13
The Popish Plot 313
Titus Oates’s allegations 314
Origin of modem party system; Tories and Whigs 314-16
Rejection of Exclusion Bill; Rye House Plot 317
Drive against borough corporations; enforcement of laws against Protestant Dis-
senters 317-18
Death of Charles II: Britain’s brief experience of a ‘continental’ political regime 318
English legal procedure 318-19
Additions to statute book in Charles II’s reign 319-20
Common law; function of the Commons in Parliament 320
Local government 320-1
Distinction between the cities of London and Westminster; increase in size and
importance of London 324
Natural resources ; increase in cultivation ; industry 324-6
Expansion of foreign trade; the trading companies 326-7
Maritime policy; the Navigation Acts 327-8
Increase in wealth and prosperity, 1675-88 328
Taxation system; obsolescent system of accountancy 329
England’s advance achieved in spite of Stuart kings 329
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CHAPTER XIV
EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA
By E. E. Rich, Master of St Catharine's College and Smuts Professor of
Imperial History in the University of Cambridge
Difference between French and English colonial policies .... page 330
Lack of coherence in English colonies 330
Colonial policy of Restoration period 330-1
Common anti-Dutch colonial policy of France and England; rivalry after 1675 . 331-2
Re-enactment of English Navigation Act; ineffective government by committees
of privy council 332
Shaftesbury’s colonial administration 332-3
Policy of the Lords of Trade; efforts to check evasions of Navigation Acts . . 333-4
Attitude of Lords of Trade to West Indies 334~5
Predominant position of Massachusetts among New England colonies . . 335-6
Transition period in status of New England colonies 336
Connecticut, its prosperity and territorial expansion 336-7
Rhode Island granted royal charter 337
Navigation Acts disregarded by Massachusetts; parliamentary commission of
inquiry 337-8
James, Duke of York, granted charter to New Netherland ; surrender of Dutch . 338-9
Changes in English colonial frontier after second Anglo-Dutch War . . . 339
Trouble in New Jersey 340
Vicissitudes of New Netherland in third Anglo-Dutch War .... 340
James’s attitude as proprietor .... 341
Quaker settlements; William Penn’s intervention with James .... 341-2
Nicolls, Andros, and Dongan as governors of New York 342-3
Proprietary charter for Carolina 344
Settlement for Barbados 344
Carolina’s ‘Fundamental Constitutions’; trouble over Navigation Acts 345-6
Creation of Pennsylvania; Penn’s administration 346-7
Unrest and revolt in Virginia 347-8
Maryland under Lord Baltimore and his son 348-9
Indian war in Massachusetts ; charter declared null and void .... 350-1
Moves for union of the colonies; the short-lived Dominion 351-3
Extent of French power in North America 353-4
French struggle with the Iroquois 354-5
Struggle between French and English in West Indies during second Anglo-Dutch
War 356
Lack of French support for Talon, intendant of Canada 356
Compagnie des Indes Occidentales 356-7
Expeditions by French fur-traders and missionaries 357-8
Exploration of course of Mississippi 358-9
French expansion limited by Louis’s wars in Europe 359
English Hudson’s Bay Company; French activity in the area .... 359-60
Revocation of charter of Compagnie des Indes Occidentales’, the fur trade . . 361-2
Southward and westward thrusts by French; opposition in France to further
expansion 362-3
Formation of Compagnie de la Baie d' Hudson and Compagnie du Nord . . 364-5
Unsuccessful French war against Iroquois 365
Successful attack on English at Hudson Bay ; their position sacrificed by treaty of 1 686 366
French massacred by Iroquois 367-8
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CHAPTER XV
SPAIN AND HER EMPIRE
By Juan ReglA, Professor of Modern History in the University of Valencia
Slow recovery (1648-88) from economic depression; setback to centralising
tendencies page 369
Spain no longer a great power 369
Population trends 369-70
Polarisation of society; increase of nobility and clergy 370
Decline in import of precious metals ; successive inflation and deflation . . 370-1
Monetary disasters of years 1656-80 371-2
Failure of the aristocracy as a ruling group; exaggerated cult of honour . . 372-3
Excessive numbers of clergy 373
Depression of trade 373-4
Economic recovery of Catalonia; collaboration with the monarchy . . 374
Foreign residents in Spain; slow growth of religious toleration .... 374-5
Activities of English and Dutch merchants 375
Condition of peasants and artisans 375-6
Poverty; expulsion of moriscos a blow to agriculture 376
Adverse effect of trading concessions to foreign nationals 376-7
Financial difficulties of the Crown 377
Economic recession in Spanish America 377-8
Social structure of the Indies; sale of offices 378
Agricultural difficulties; breakdown of trade monopolies; increase of smuggling 378-9
Reasons for collapse of Spanish colonial system 379
The Spanish monarchy 380
Last years of Philip IV 380
Regency of Queen Mother; reign of Charles II 380-1
Peace of the Pyrenees; French gains and Spanish losses 381
Further wars with France; further Spanish losses 382
Spanish greatness in art, literature, and learning 382-3
CHAPTER XVI
PORTUGAL AND HER EMPIRE
By V. M. Godinho, Professor of Economic and Social History at the
Institute of Overseas Studies, Lisbon
Extent of Portuguese empire ; Africa and Brazil as its bases .... 384-5
Value of exports from Brazil to Portugal 385
Trade between Brazil and Spanish America 385-6
Precarious position of Portugal’s African coastal possessions .... 386
Azores and Madeira 386
Exports from Portugal .... 386-7
Price movements and monetary policy 387-8
Challenge of English and Dutch East India Companies; foundation of Brazilian
Trading Company 388
Opposition to Company; its eventual transformation into a royal council . . 388-9
Restoration of independence 389
Function and composition of Cortes 389-90
Oscillation between government by Councils and High Courts, and government by
the king 390
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Secretariat of State; the Councils of State, War, and Finance . . . page 390-1
Junta dos Tres Estados 39 1
Administration of justice 391-2
Machinery of State dominated by great nobility, high clergy, and judges . . 391-2
Background of the Restoration; relations between Portugal and Spain . . 392
Relations with Dutch; truce on land, but war at sea; Dutch capitulation in Brazil 392-3
War with Spain; relations with France and England 393-4
Question of John IV’s successor; regency of Queen Mother .... 394-5
Castelho Melhor transfers power to Afonso; reorganisation of Portuguese army 395
Portugal at end of Spanish war 395-6
Fall of Castelho Melhor; Afonso’s resignation in favour of Pedro . . . 396
Post-Restoration government in Portugal 396-7
CHAPTER XVII
EUROPE AND ASIA
I. THE EUROPEAN CONNECTION WITH ASIA
By J. B. Harrison, Lecturer in the History of Modern India, School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Expansion of Asian trade with Europe effected by Portuguese, Dutch, and English
in sixteenth century 398
Expansion after 1650 398
Coffee and tea imports by England, Dutch Republic, and France; coffee-houses 398-9
Popularity of Asian cotton 399-400
Hostility of French and English manufacturers to import of Asian textiles . . 400-1
Bullionist, mercantilist, and protectionist objections to Asian trade ... 401
Comparative lack of Protestant missionary activity in Asia 403-4
Dutch missionary activity 404-5
English and Danish missionaries 405
Missionary activities of France, Italy, and Catholic Germany .... 405-6
Trouble over Spanish and Portuguese papal grants; dispute with Rome over
dispatch of vicars-apostolic 406-7
Rivalries between Orders; attacks on Jesuits 407-9
Popularity of Eastern porcelain and lacquer; changes in style to suit European
demand 409-10
Stimulus to botanical and zoological studies 41 1
Advances in geography and cartography; travel literature 412-13
Missionaries as interpreters of Asia to Europe 413-14
Varying awareness of Asiatic civilisations 414-15
Beginnings of study of comparative linguistics 415
Interest in Confucian and Hindu morality 415-16
Comparisons between economic and political institutions of Europe and Asia . 416
2. THE ENGLISH AND DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANIES
By C. D. Cowan, Lecturer in the History of South-East Asia, School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Strong position of the Dutch East India Company 417
Trading factories planted within jurisdiction of independent Asian States . . 418
Position of English East India Company 418-19
Resources, organisation, and power of Dutch Company 419-20
The powers, direction, and charter of the English Company .... 420-1
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Consolidation by Dutch Company page 421
Reduction of Atjeh in Sumatra and of Macassar; extension of Dutch authority
in Java 422-4
Puritan-Royalist conflicts in English settlements in India 424-5
Increasing importance of military element in maintenance of English settlements 425-6
Policy of Sir Josiah and Sir John Child; agreement with Aurangzib . . . 426-7
Decline of English East India Company after 1688; establishment of ‘United
Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies’ . 427-8
The English and Dutch Companies in the eighteenth century .... 428-9
CHAPTER XVIII
THE EMPIRE AFTER THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
By F. L. Carsten
Years of peace within the Empire after 1648 430
Interference by foreign powers facilitated by terms of peace settlement 430-1
The Rhenish Alliance 431-2
Position of the Emperor 432
Lack of unity in the Empire; imprecise limits of princely authority . 432-3
Stability of religious frontiers after 1648 433
Problem of absorption of mercenaries; critical condition of economy 433-4
Depopulation of countryside during Thirty Years War 435
Effects of depopulation in Bavaria 435-6
Serfdom in various forms 436-7
Improvement in condition of peasantry in western and southern Germany in
contrast with north-east 437-8
Contemporary descriptions of peasants and noblemen 438-9
Decline of nobility 440
Decline of Free Imperial Cities and of towns within principalities 440-1
Heavy tolls and excises 441-2
Effects of princely power over towns 442
Opportunities for foreign merchants and financiers due to native decline . 442-3
Influence of Thirty Years War on course of German history .... 443-4
Survival of institutions of the Empire 444
Composition of Imperial Diet; the three houses 444-5
Recess of 1654; princes’ pressure for legal decisions to be taken against their
Estates 445-6
Diet becoming permanent ; its business 446-7
Attitude of Diet during War of Devolution 447
The Imperial army 448-9
The Imperial courts ; the Aulic Council and the Reichskammergericht . . . 449-50
Growing absolutism of German princes; the fascination of Versailles . 450-1
Decline of the Palatinate 451-2
Development of Bavaria under centralised government 452-3
Development of Saxony after Thirty Years War; the issue of Poland . 453-4
Hanover: preoccupation of Electors with Britain 454-5
Holstein and Baden-Durlach : Estates lose their influence 455
Conflicts between dukes and Estates in Mecklenburg and Wiirttemberg . 455-6
Great variety of constitutional developments in Germany 456-7
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CHAPTER XIX
ITALY AFTER THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
By Giorgio Spini, Professor of History in the University of Florence
Fundamental importance of Peace of Westphalia in Italian history . . page 458
Spain’s power in Italy opposed by that of France 458-9
Internal conflicts in Italy linked with Franco-Spanish rivalry .... 459-60
Franco-Spanish relations in Italy under Richelieu and Mazarin .... 460
Repercussions of massacre of Waldensians (1655) 460-1
Political immobility in Italy; decline of the Holy See 461
War of Candia between Venice and Turks 461-4
Decline in prestige of the papacy 464
Unfriendly relations between France and the Holy See 464-6
Political stagnation and population loss resulting from Thirty Years War . 466
Decline of towns 467
Agricultural advance discouraged by unenterprising landed nobility . 467-8
Slow economic improvement towards end of century 468
Inability to maintain former intellectual standard 468-9
Decadence of ruling houses 469
Piedmont and the ambitions of Duke Charles Emanuel 469-70
Inefficiency of Spanish administration; fate of Messina 470
Louis XIV’s designs on Casale and Genoa 471
Successes of Innocent XI’s Holy League 471
Louis’s domination of Savoy; Victor Amadeus’s attempted coup d'etat 472
Catinat sent into Piedmont: renewed persecution of Waldensians 472-3
Victor Amadeus’s defiance of France 473
CHAPTER XX
THE HABSBURG LANDS
By R. R. Betts, Masaryk Professor of Central European History in the
University of London
Rise of Habsburg Empire in the sixteenth century 474
Characteristics of the Habsburg dynasty 474-5
Austrian Habsburgs’ view of their duties and the rights of the Imperial crown . 475
Extent of Ferdinand Ill’s dominions in 1648 476
Lands of the Crown of St Wenceslas; Bohemia a testing-ground for centralised
autocracy 476-7
Ferdinand’s titles under the Crown of St Stephen; the administration of Hungary 477-8
Devastation and depopulation during Thirty Years War 478-9
Exploitation of land by nobility; demesne farming 479-1
Decline of towns 481
State of literature and the arts 481-2
Success of Counter-Reformation 482-5
Central institutions of the monarchy 485
Ferdinand’s concern about the succession; Leopold I crowned at Pressburg and
Prague 486
War between Sweden and Poland; death of Ferdinand III 486
Accession of Leopold I ; war with Sweden as Poland’s ally ; coronation at Frankfurt 486-7
Revival of Turkish aggression under Mehmed Kopriilu 487-8
Subjection of Transylvania by the Turks 488-9
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Aid for defence of Austria; battle of St Gotthard and Peace of Vasvdr page 490-1
Leopold’s interest in the Spanish succession 491
Failure of nationalist conspiracy in Hungary; Austrian occupation . . 492-3
Forcible recatholicisation in Hungary 493-4
Conclusion by Leopold of anti-French alliances 494
Bohemia’s ‘age of darkness’; peasant revolt of 1680 494-5
Hungarian exiles’ attempt to liberate northern Hungary 495-6
Reconciliation efforts of Innocent XI; Hungary’s liberties restored by Leopold . 496
Conquest of Hungary by Thokoly and Kara Mustafa 497
Vienna besieged by Turks, liberated by John Sobieski 497
Ascendancy of Austria after victory at Vienna; Innocent’s Holy League . . 497-8
Hungary reduced to provincial status after expulsion of Turks .... 498
Constitutional position of Transylvania after expulsion of Turks . . . 499
CHAPTER XXI
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE UNDER MEHMED IV
By A. N. Kurat, Professor of History in the University of Ankara
Extent and population of the empire of Mehmed IV 500
Agriculture and trade 500-1
Army and navy 501-2
Decline of governmental institutions since Suleiman the Magnificent . . 502
Offices of Grand Vizier, Mufti, and Kadi 502-3
Government of the provinces; special status of some provinces .... 503-4
Decay of institutions and society 504
Deposition of Sultan Ibrahim; accession of infant Mehmed .... 504-5
Power exercised by Turhan, Mehmed’s mother 505
Attempt by Tarhondju Ahmed Pasha, the Grand Vizier, to restore economy . 505-6
Popular anxiety; appointment of Kopriilii Mehmed Pasha as Grand Vizier . 506
His purge of government officials; suppression of rebellion in Asia Minor . . 507-8
Recovery of command in the Aegean 508
Struggle over Hungary and Transylvania 508-9
Kopriilii’s achievement as Grand Vizier; succession of Fazil Ahmed Kopriilii ; his
domestic policy 509-10
Foreign policy; success in Crete; threat to Vienna 510
Battle of St Gotthard and Peace of Vasvir 51 1
Turkish influence in the Ukraine 512
Kara Mustafa Pasha as Grand Vizier; his designs on Vienna .... 512-13
Turkish refusal to renew Peace of Vasvdr; Turkish advance on Vienna . . 513-14
Christian rulers’ aid to Austria; Leopold’s alliance with John Sobieski . . 514
Rout of Turkish forces before Vienna; execution of Kara Mustafa . . . 515-16
Deposition of Mehmed IV ; succession of Suleiman II ; decline of Ottoman Empire 517-18
CHAPTER XXII
SCANDINAVIA AND THE BALTIC
By Jerker Ros£n, Professor of History in the University of Lund
Sweden’s position at home and abroad after Thirty Years War .... 519
The dominium mar is Baltici 519-20
Burden of taxation; popular unrest; dissension among Estates .... 520-1
Abdication of Queen Christina, accession of Charles X 521
Charles X’s expansionist foreign policy; war in Poland 521-2
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Sweden’s victory over Denmark; Peace of Roskilde page 522
Consequences of Denmark's loss of eastern provinces 522-3
Increasing financial difficulties of Danish crown after accession of Frederick III 523
Financial and constitutional reforms; introduction of hereditary kingship . . 523-4
Frederick proclaimed sovereign king; new constitution 524
Further administrative, financial, and legal reforms; energetic trade policy . . 524-5
Changed position of nobility 525-6
Change in agricultural methods; condition of peasantry 526
Death of Charles X of Sweden; regency of Queen Mother 526-7
Peace with Poland and Russia; Sweden at zenith of her power .... 527
Constant hostility between Denmark and Sweden 527-9
Sweden defeated by Brandenburg at Fehrbellin; Danish defeat at Lund . . 529
Treaty of Lund; relaxation of traditional Dano-Swedish enmity . . . . 530-1
Swedish government during minority of Charles XI 531
Charles’s assumption of authority; military reorganisation 531-2
Sentence passed on members of regency government; Charles given unlimited
legislative authority 532-3
Resumption of Crown lands and improved position of peasants .... 533-5
Differences and similarities between Danish and Swedish absolutism . . 535-6
Relations between Swedish crown and Baltic provinces 536
Swedification of Livonia and Estonia 537
Caroline absolutism until the Great Northern War 537-8
Danish foreign policy under Ahlefeldt; lapse of alliance with Sweden . . 538
Swedish-Dutch peace treaty; Treaty of The Hague (1681) 538-9
Louis XIV’s attitude to northern peace treaties and negotiations with Denmark
and Brandenburg 539-40
League of Augsburg joined by Sweden; alliance with Brandenburg . . . 540
Denmark’s aggressive policy; defensive alliance between Charles XI and dukes
of Liineburg . 540
Negotiations to settle Holstein-Gottorp conflict 540-1
Consequences for Scandinavia of Anglo-Dutch dynastic alliance; Dano-Swedish
treaty of armed neutrality 541
Sweden and France; mediation at Peace of Ryswick 541-2
CHAPTER XXIII
THE RISE OF BRANDENBURG
By F. L. Carsten
Condition of Brandenburg in sixteenth century 543-4
Acquisitions of territories by Hohenzollerns before and after Thirty Years War . 544
Frederick William, the Great Elector; his aim of welding scattered territories into
one State 544-5
Negotiations with Estates about money grants for his army .... 545-6
Changes in relationship between Elector and Estates during War of the North . 546
Frederick William’s sovereignty in Prussia recognised by Poland . . . 547
His authority established in Cleves and Mark 547-8
Destruction of influence of Estates in Brandenburg 548
Growth of military bureaucracy ; acquiescence of Brandenburg nobility . . 549
Severe measures against opposition in Prussia 549-50
Introduction of urban excise, emergence of military authorities, weakening of
Estates 550-1
The Generalkriegskommissariat and its activities 551-2
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The standing army and its administration page 552
Frederick William’s economic, naval, colonial, and foreign policy . . . 553-5
His achievements 555
Accession of Frederick III; no further territorial gains 555—6
Leopold I accepts creation of kingdom of Prussia; Frederick’s coronation at
Konigsberg 556-7
Frederick’s emulation of Louis XTV ; his support of the arts .... 557
Different policy of Frederick William I 558
CHAPTER XXIV
POLAND TO THE DEATH OF JOHN SOBIESKI
By Horst Jablonowski, Professor of East European History in the
University of Bonn
Extent and population of Poland-Lithuania in mid-seventeenth century . 559
Social structure; leading role of nobility 559~6o
Rival influence of France and the Habsburgs in Poland; Michael Wisnowiecki
elected king 560-1
Election of John Sobieski 561
Disruptive effect of liberum veto in the diet 561-2
External interference aimed at preventing reforms 562-3
John Casimir’s attempts at constitutional reform 563-4
Opposition to John Sobieski’s attempts at reform 564
Dominance of Roman Catholic Church 564-5
Position of Orthodox Church 565
Economic, social, and political decline 565-6
Russian invasion of Poland-Lithuania in 1654; revolt of Cossacks . 566
Swedish intervention and occupation; revival of Polish resistance . . . 566-7
Peace between Poland and Russia through mediation of Emperor . . . 567
Conflict of pro-Polish and anti-Polish coalitions on Polish soil; Poland’s alliance
with Brandenburg 568
Resumption of war against Russia ; armistice of Andrusovo .... 568-9
Turkish invasion of 1672; Treaty of Buiai; Sobieski’s victory at Chotin . . 569
Sobieski’s alliance with other Christian powers; his victory at Vienna, but lack of
further success against Turks 570
CHAPTER XXV
RUSSIA; THE BEGINNING OF WESTERNISATION
By Werner Philipp, Professor of East European History in the
Free University of Berlin
Situation in Russia at accession of Alexis Michailovich 571-2
Uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks under Chmel’nyckyj against Polish rule 572
Nature of union of 1654 between Cossacks and Moscow 573-4
War against Poland ; conflict between Sweden and Russia 574
Cossacks joining Poland under Ivan Vygovsky; returning to Russia under Yury
Chmel’nydkyj 574-5
DoroSenko pledging Cossack allegiance to Khan of Crimea .... 575
Poland, Ukraine, and Russia after armistice of Andrusovo; ‘perpetual peace’ . 575-6
Broadening of Moscow’s political horizons 577
Modernisation of the army 577-8
Growth of autocracy ; state service imposed on society 579-80
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Trade and commerce, foreign merchants page 580-1
Clergy 581
Administrative machinery 581-3
Popular discontent at heavy taxation and growth of bureaucracy; urban risings 583-4
Crisis over debasement of coinage 584
Rebellion of Stepan Razin 584-5
New code of law 585
Growing autocratic tendency after the ‘Troubles’ 585-6
Nikon’s attempt to elevate ecclesiastical over secular power .... 586-7
Nikon deprived of patriarchal dignities 587-8
Graecophil reform of Russian Church 588-9
Schism: the Old Believers 589-90
Incompatibility of traditional Russian piety with independent Western thought;
the end of old Russia 590-1
Index 593
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION:
THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV
T he Peace of Westphalia, concluded in the year with which this
volume begins, not only brought to an end one of the most devastat-
ing wars in the history of Europe; it also terminated one of the most
decisive periods of European history, that of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation. Although religious events and motives continued
to be of vital importance in the history of many European countries —
such as France, England and the Habsburg territories — there were no
further changes in the religious frontiers: the European countries and
principalities retained the religion which was established there in 1648.
Only religious minorities — such as the Austrian Protestants and the
French Huguenots — might be forced to leave their native countries; or
they might receive official recognition — as the Non-Conformists did in
England. It is true, of course, that the rule of Islam was broken in south-
eastern Europe during the period covered by this and subsequent vol-
umes, but this was a political change; it freed the Hungarians and other
Balkan Christians from Turkish overlordship, but did not change the
religious loyalties of the population. Even in much-divided Germany the
religious frontiers remained stable after the peace of 1648. Although
several German princely houses changed their faith during the subsequent
decades — mainly from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism— their sub-
jects did not follow this example, but kept their religion. Very slowly —
perhaps only through mutual exhaustion after many years of fighting —
the religious conflicts began to subside and religious hatred started to
recede : to be fanned into new flames by the dragonnades and the Revoca-
tion of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Some of the leading thinkers and
writers of Europe were attempting a rapprochement between the different
Christian faiths or dreaming of one all-embracing religion. A more
rational approach to the world and its problems can be observed in many
a field. The great advances in science and learning were working in the
same direction. The way was beginning to be prepared for the rationalism
and the enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
The Peace of Westphalia also marked the end of the dreams of reform
and unification of the Empire which had been cherished by Maximilian I
and Charles V, and which the Emperor Ferdinand II had once more tried
to transfer into the realm of reality in the course of the Thirty Years
War. Henceforth the Empire was a loose federation of many States,
which indeed survived into the early nineteenth century, but even no min -
l l NCUUV
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
ally ceased to be the leading Christian State. Although many further
reforms were attempted after 1648, they produced little practical result.
What is even more important, the great alliance which had dominated
Europe for more than a century — that of the Spanish and the Austrian
Habsburgs — was no longer a powerful combination. The defeat of the
‘invincible’ Spanish army at Rocroi (1643) by the French under Conde
not only marked the decline of Habsburg power, but was a portent of
things to come. The Austrian Habsburgs were much less affected than
their Spanish cousins by this decline, in spite of the continuing disintegra-
tion of the Empire. Yet they were hard pressed by the Turks, who
reverted to a policy of conquest under the efficient administration of the
Kopriiliis. It was only after the siege of Vienna of 1 683 that the tide in the
Balkans turned and the Habsburg armies conquered large territories in
Hungary and Transylvania; yet no unified Habsburg State came into
being. The Austrian Habsburgs continued to be one of the leading fami-
lies of Europe — far longer indeed than any other ruling house; for their
rivals in Berlin and Moscow were only beginning to lay the foundations
of their future greatness during the second half of the seventeenth century.
Pride of place, however, without any doubt belonged to the Bourbons: it
was the ascendancy of France which was most clearly marked by the Peace
of Westphalia, although Louis XIV was only ten years old when the peace
was signed, and although the war between France and Spain was to con-
tinue for another eleven years.
When the young Louis XIV surveyed the European scene in 1661, at
the beginning of his personal government, his secretary could write at his
behest with much justification:
Spain was unable to recover so quickly from her great losses : she was not only with-
out funds, but without credit, incapable of any great effort in terms of money or
man-power, occupied with the war against Portugal Her king was old and in
dubious health; he had but one son, young and rather feeble
I had nothing to fear from the Emperor, who was elected only because he was
a member of the House of Austria and tied in a thousand ways by a capitulation
with the Estates of the Empire 1 The Electors, who above all had imposed upon
him such harsh conditions and could hardly doubt his resentment, lived in con-
tinuous distrust of him; a party of the other princes of the Empire was working in
my interest.
Sweden could have true and durable relations only with me; she had just lost
a great king, 2 and all she could aspire to was to maintain her conquests during the
infancy of her new king. Denmark was weakened by the preceding war with Sweden,
in which she had almost succumbed, and thought only of peace and recovery.
England could hardly breathe after her past ills and only tried to strengthen the
government under a newly re-established king who was, moreover, well-inclined
towards France.
1 See below, ch. xvm, p. 446.
* See below, ch. xxu, pp. 522-3, 526, for the death of Charles X and the defeat of Denmark.
2
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INTRODUCTION
The whole policy of the Dutch and of those governing Holland had only two aims:
to sustain trade and to abase the House of Orange; the least war would hinder them
in the one as well as in the other aim, and their greatest support rested on my
goodwill . . .
If this was the state of affairs at the beginning of Louis’s rule the balance
of power changed even more strongly in favour of France during the fol-
lowing years. This was a period during which France dominated Europe
more completely than it has ever been dominated by a single power since
Roman days. When she repeated this feat under Napoleon I it was for a
much briefer spell of time; and Napoleon’s power remained severely
limited to the Continent, while Louis’s embraced parts of America and
strongly influenced Stuart England. After the victorious conclusion of the
war of 1672-8 Louis was able to write:
In the course of this war I flatter myself that I demonstrated what France, unaided,
can achieve. France supplied my allies with millions and I poured out money freely;
I found the means of striking terror into the hearts of my enemies, of astounding my
neighbours and making my detractors despair. All my subjects supported me to the
best of their ability: in the armies, by their valour, in my kingdom, by their zeal,
and in foreign lands, by their industry and skill; in short, France proved the differ-
ence between herself and other nations by her achievements 2
The strength of France rested on the weakness of her neighbours,
deeply divided among themselves, as well as on her own resources, her
wealth, her population, her army and her navy. With eighteen or nineteen
million inhabitants, she had more than thrice the population of Spain,
Italy or England, more than eight times that of the United Provinces or
Portugal, more even than Muscovite Russia. This large population and
her wealth enabled France to maintain an army which in peacetime
reached a strength of more than 100,000, and much higher figures in time
of war. Led by great generals — Conde, Turenne, Luxembourg — it set the
pace for its opponents and became a model for the armies of other
European countries. It gave an example in military education and the art
of siege and fortification, as well as in efficient military administration.
The intendants de Varmee, introduced by Le Tellier, the Secretary of State
for War, brought order into the chaotic system of army finances and of
levying contributions in occupied countries. The French army ceased to
consist of semi-independent units and was on its way to becoming a
national army, although many regiments of foreign mercenaries con-
tinued to serve in it ; a much larger number of French noblemen chose the
career of professional officer, a factor indicating the same trend of
development. The weight of France’s military effort remained concen-
trated in Europe and on land. Yet Colbert created a navy which made
France the third maritime power in the Atlantic and the first in the
1 CEuvres de Louis XIV (Paris, 1806), 1, 14-16 (1661).
* Ibid, in, 130-1.
3 *-*
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
Mediterranean; and the French system of conscription, the inscription
maritime, which applied to all seamen and fishermen, gave her an advan-
tage over her rivals at sea.
France’s fertile soil was able to maintain a large and comparatively
dense population, in spite of primitive methods of agriculture and the
heavy burdens imposed upon the peasantry. While there was no improve-
ment in these conditions during the later seventeenth century, French
industry made great progress under the efficient direction of Colbert.
Intervention, direction and support by the State were almost inevitable in
a country where the members of the bourgeoisie invested in land, rentes
and offices rather than in trade and industry. It was the great merit of
Colbert that he provided the capital and, even more, the initiative which
French industry needed, and that he supplied Louis XIV with the financial
means which his ambitious foreign policy required. Colbert’s example
was the inspiration for many countries of Europe, especially for those
where (even more than in France) State action had to be substituted for
the spontaneous activities of the middle classes. In France it was not only
the luxury industries which benefited from State subsidies and protection,
but also the basic cloth and silk industries, the foundries and ironworks,
as well as the arsenals and dockyards. The construction of the Canal des
Deux Mers and other canals greatly improved the internal system of com-
munications. French trade with other European countries, with Asia, and
especially with the West Indies expanded greatly; but the trading com-
panies founded by Colbert on the model of the Dutch and English
companies tended to rely on the State which had created them and were
hampered by government interference.
The leading role of France was not only marked in the political and
military fields, but extended into those of literature, thought, art, educa-
tion, manners and fashion. Much as everything French was criticised and
condemned in the countries directly menaced by France, such attacks
were unable to halt the victorious advance of French culture during its
grand siecle. French increasingly became the language of polite society,
of the educated, and of the upper classes in many parts of Europe. The
salons of Paris, presided over by the most accomplished ladies of Europe,
set a pattern soon to be imitated even in Muscovite Russia; while
Versailles, its art and architecture, its operas and ballets, its ceremonial
and its style, was the model which every crowned head of Europe strove to
imitate to the best of his ability. French fashions became dominant in
dress and hairstyles, in cooking and gardening, in furniture and interior
decoration, as far as the wealthy and the upper classes were concerned.
Even the dispersal of the Huguenots brought about as an entirely unpre-
meditated result the establishment of French luxury and other industries,
the diffusion of the French language and way of life, the spread of French
art and literature to their adopted countries, on the development of which
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INTRODUCTION
the exiles exercised a most profound influence. The scions of the European
princes and nobility in their turn were sent to France to admire the marvel
of Versailles and to study French accomplishments and manners at the
source. The first performance of the ballet Le Triomphe de V Amour at
Versailles in 1681 was attended by the margrave of Ansbach, the dukes of
Hanover, Holstein and Wiirttemberg, as well as other princes.
Owing to the impoverishment of Rome and the decline of the Italian
city republics and the papal curia, France became the centre of the arts
and, within France, Paris and Versailles their new capitals. The Court
alone could mobilise the resources and the patronage required for a mas-
sive development of the arts such as had been provided by the Italian cities
until the Thirty Years War. Colbert made the king the foremost patron
of the arts and the Royal Academies, which were controlled by Colbert,
the chief arbiters of taste. The State organised the production of art as an
integral part of the system of absolutism which permeated every sphere of
society, and which tried to regulate everything from above. In France the
culture of the Baroque became almost a prerogative of the court, which
laid down the principles guiding the arts. Like the government of the
State, the arts should be uniform, exact and clear; they should be gov-
erned by binding regulations ; the individual artist, like any other member
of society, should not be allowed any freedom, but should serve the State
and obey its rules. The duty of the arts was the glorification of Louis XIV,
and the Academies were entrusted with the execution of this task. The
painter Lebrun was appointed the director of the Academie Royale de
Peinture et de Sculpture as well as of the Academie de France in Rome, the
premier peintre du roi, and the manager of the Gobelin tapestry works,
where he developed an enormous activity. He supervised the execution of
all their plans of production and drafted many of them himself. In their
workshops the decorations and statues for the royal palaces and gardens
were produced. There the art of Versailles developed on the basis of
Lebrun’s authoritarian rules and principles. In this way the primacy of
the State was clearly established, and French culture became the hand-
maiden of French absolutism. Innumerable large busts, statues, reliefs
and paintings of the roi soleil emanated from the workshops or were
commissioned by the State to spread the glory of the king. The dictator-
ship of the Royal Academies, which became the model of similar acad-
emies in many European countries, exercised an even more unfortunate
influence. Lebrun was a superb craftsman, but the style Louis XIV was
dull and monotonous. The examples of our own century show only too
vividly that the arts cannot be marshalled like an army without disastrous
consequences.
It was, however, in the field of literature that France above all showed
her native genius during this period. No other country could boast of so
many brilliant names as those of Moliere and Racine, La Fontaine and
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Madame de Sevigne, Pascal and Bossuet, Boileau and La Rochefoucauld,
within so short a period. Many, but by no means all of them, owed their
rapid success to the exercise of royal patronage. Indeed, Louis XIV
exercised a much more beneficial influence on literature than on art and
architecture, where his pronounced taste for the grandiose and the colos-
sal had rather unfortunate results, precisely because it impressed his
contemporaries to such an extent and set the standard for the official art
of so many European countries. Yet it remains true that under his
patronage and supervision the arts and literature flourished and that
France became the leading country not only in the military field.
What was the king like who gave his name to his age, what were his
motives, and how did he rule France? Even his critics and his enemies
had to admire him. The due de Saint-Simon, who hated Louis because of
his abasement of the French nobility, wrote in his Memoires:
Louis XTV was made for a brilliant court. In the midst of other men, his figure, his
courage, his grace, his beauty, his grand mien, even the tone of his voice and the
majestic and natural charm of all his person, distinguished him till his death as the
King Bee, and showed that, if he had only been bom a simple private gentleman,
he would equally have excelled in fetes, pleasures and gallantry, and would have had
the greatest success in love 1
Another observer, the Venetian ambassador Primi Visconti, reported
somewhat later:
The King maintains the most impenetrable secrecy about affairs of State. The
ministers attend council meetings, but he confides his plans to them only when he
has reflected at length upon them and has come to a definite decision. I wish you
might see the King. His expression is inscrutable; his eyes like those of a fox. He
never discusses State affairs except with his ministers in council. When he speaks
to courtiers he refers only to their respective prerogatives and duties. Even the most
frivolous of his utterances has the air of being the pronouncement of an oracle 2
Louis XTV had indeed drawn one lesson from the rule of the two
cardinals and the experiences of his childhood : never to have a prime
minister, and never to admit a high ecclesiastic or a high nobleman to his
inner council. One of the first passages in the Memoires, written at the
beginning of his personal rule in 1661, emphasised: ‘Since my childhood
the very name of idle kings [rois faineans ] and mayors of the palace has
given me pain when mentioned in my presence . . . .’ 3 From the outset
Louis was determined to rule himself and to shoulder the vast burden of
work which this entailed — devotion to duty was by no means a trait
exclusive to certain eighteenth-century rulers. His day was regulated and
filled to the minutest detail from the moment of waking to that of retiring
1 The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon, translated by Bayle St John (London, 1900),
u, 357 -
2 Quoted by Louis Bertrand, Louis XIV (New York and London, 1928), pp. 292-3.
' CEuvres de Louis XIV (Paris, 1806), 1, 6.
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INTRODUCTION
to bed. Many hours were taken up by work and the even more tiring
elaborate court ceremonial, which was introduced during his reign after
the example of the Spanish court. As the king put it for the benefit of the
Dauphin: ‘But I would tell you quite simply that I feel for this labour,
however unpleasant it may be, less repugnance than others, because I have
always considered it the sweetest pleasure of the world to find satisfaction
in doing one’s duty. I have often wondered how it could happen that,
while love of work is a quality so essential to a sovereign, it is nevertheless
one of those which is found so seldom among them. . ,.’ 1 Although this
picture may be rather a rosy one, there can be no doubt that Louis
throughout his life submitted himself to an extremely arduous routine
without ever voicing a complaint, and that for more than half a century
he was the real ruler of France. Unfortunately, in the eighteenth century
Louis’s admonitions were not heeded and the kings of France once more
became des rois faineans.
Louis considered it his duty to supervise all the details of government
and administration, but the system of government remained unchanged.
Although it was refurbished and made more efficient by Colbert and other
ministers, nothing was done to reform the basic features of the ancien
regime, which eventually were to cause its downfall. The tax-exemptions
of the privileged classes, especially the nobility, remained in force,
although Colbert strove to limit the number of those exempted from the
taille and other taxes and to enforce payment by those who were not
entitled to claim privilege. Louis, however, needed more and more money
to carry out his ambitious foreign policy. Thus offices continued to be
sold, thousands of useless offices continued to be created, and their
holders could claim exemption from taxation. The bureaucracy became
huge and unwieldy, a clog to economic and social development. The
monopolies of the gilds were extended and new branches of industry sub-
jected to their control, while the artisans were forced to join the gilds,
again for purely fiscal reasons. If private initiative and private capital
investment were lacking, this was partly due to the fact that the French
State provided opportunities for investment which carried no risk with
them and led to social advancement. The holders of the highest offices
might finally be entitled to enter the ranks of the nobility, the leading
social group, or to intermarry with it; for French society was dominated
by the standards of the nobility, in spite of its decline, and not by those of
the bourgeoisie.
Louis XIV was not a reformer, nor was he a great general. William of
Orange, Charles X and Charles XI of Sweden, Frederick III of Denmark,
John Sobieski of Poland, the Great Elector of Brandenburg led their
armies in battle; but Louis appeared a military genius only in the eyes of
his courtiers and servants. After the fall of Maastricht in July 1673 even
1 Ibid , i, 105 (1661).
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the great Colbert flattered the king: ‘All Your Majesty’s campaigns have
that character of surprise and astonishment which takes hold of the spirit
and leaves to it only one liberty, to admire. . . . One must admit that such
extraordinary means to acquire glory have never been thought of by any-
one but Your Majesty n Ten months later, after the capture of
Besan^on, Colbert wrote : ‘ One has, Sire, to be silent, to admire, to thank
God every day that we have been bom in the reign of a king such as Your
Majesty, who has no limits to his power but his own will . . . . ’ 2 Louis
intervened with the details of military administration and jurisdiction,
perhaps because he was conscious of his own shortcomings as a military
leader and wanted to assert his will in this sphere too ; for it was during his
reign that the authority of the State over the army was established. In
1674, when a sergeant of the de Dampierre regiment was commended for
distinguished service in Holland, his general was informed : ‘ His Majesty
desires that Lafleur be promoted lieutenant in the regiment de Dampierre
when there is a vacancy, and that in the meantime he be given a gratuity
of five hundred livres .’ 3 When in 1683 a soldier was court-martialled and
shot for organising a protest against illegal deductions from the men’s
pay, Louvois was instructed to write: ‘ His Majesty regards what has been
done to the soldier as murder There was nothing that justified such an
example being made of him lam sending orders to M. de La Chetardie
to suspend the officers who sat on the court-martial and to imprison the
commanding officer who permitted the retention of the men’s pay — ’ 4
It is a king somewhat different from the cliches of the textbooks who
emerges from such actions. Even if they were undertaken as a means of
asserting his control, they show a personal interest in the men who were
gaining glory for him.
The acquisition of glory was indeed Louis’s primary motive in the con-
duct of his foreign policy. As the royal Memoires put it for the benefit of
the Dauphin: ‘You will always observe in me the same constancy in work,
the same firmness in my decisions, the same love for my people, the same
passion for the greatness of the State, and the same ardour for the true
glory. . ..’* To these considerations even the royal love affairs had to be
sacrificed, for Louis held that ‘ the time which we give to our love must
never be taken to the prejudice of our affairs, because our primary
objective must always be the conservation of our glory and our authority,
neither of which can be maintained absolutely without assiduous
labour ...’.*
The pursuit of glory was not only undertaken through war and con-
quest, but also applied in the diplomatic sphere. At the very beginning of
1 CEuvres de Louis XIV, in, 412-13. * Ibid. p. 503.
* Quoted by W. H. Lewis, The Splendid Century (London, 1953), p. 149.
* Quoted by W. H. Lewis, Louis XIV, An Informal Portrait (London, 1959), p. 129.
* CEuvres de Louis XIV, u, 4 (1666). • Ibid. p. 292 (1667).
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INTRODUCTION
Louis's personal government the issue of precedence between the Spanish
and the French ambassadors to the Court of St James’s led to an affray in
the streets of London during which the French, in spite of the help of some
officers and soldiers especially sent over, were badly beaten. Philip IV of
Spain was forced to apologise for this insult and had to concede prece-
dence at all courts to the French diplomatic representatives. Louis’s
comment after this ‘victory’ was: ‘and I do not know whether since the
beginning of the monarchy anything more glorious has ever occurred, . . .
this has been for me a long and enduring subject of joy . . . ’. The following
admonition to the Dauphin was added: ‘if there is a question, as on the
occasion which I have just mentioned to you, of the rank you hold in the
world, of the rights of your Crown, of the king thus and not of the private
individual, make bold use of the loftiness of which your heart and spirit
are capable; never betray the glory of your ancestors nor the interest of
your successors, of which you are but the depository. . .. n
Again and again Louis’s Memoires emphasise the enormous importance
attached to the splendour and might of kingship, the elevation of the king
above all others, the ‘pre-eminence which constitutes the principal beauty
of the place which we are holding’. This is the picture of the king seen
through Louis’s eyes:
All the eyes are fixed on him alone; it is to him that all the wishes are addressed;
he alone receives all the respects; he alone is the object of all hopes — Everyone
regards his good graces as the only source of all benefits; no one can raise himself
but by gradually coming closer to the royal person or estimation; all the rest is
mean, all the rest is powerless, all the rest is sterile, and one can even say that the
splendour emanating from him in his own territories spreads as by communication
into the foreign provinces. The brilliant image of the greatness to which he has
risen is carried everywhere on the wings of his reputation. As he is the admiration
of his own subjects, so he soon arouses the amazement of the neighbouring nations,
and if he makes any use of this advantage, there will be nothing, either inside or
outside his empire, which he cannot obtain in course of time 2
Kings are not only absolute rulers, but ‘have naturally the full and free
disposition of all the goods owned by the clerical as well as the secular
Estates’. 3 Any revolt against a prince, however bad he might be, Louis
held to be infinitely criminal, for ‘He who has given kings to men has
desired that they be respected as His lieutenants, reserving to Himself
alone the right to examine their conduct. His will it is that, whoever is
bom a subject, must obey without any discrimination; and this law, so
clear and so universal, has not been made only in favour of the princes,
but it is salutary even for the peoples on whom it is imposed; they can
never violate it without exposing themselves to far greater evils than those
which they pretend to guard against ’ 4 God alone is the judge of
1 Ibid, i, 132, 139 (1661). * Ibid. 11, 66-9 (1666).
* Ibid. p. 121 (1666). * Ibid. p. 336 (1667).
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princes; for them alone it is to deliberate and to resolve; the other mem-
bers of society have but one function : to execute the orders given to them
by the head. 1 The Divine Right of kings could not be formulated more
trenchantly, more forcefully, than it was done by its most powerful
protagonist.
Convinced of his divine appointment and task, Louis XIV would brook
no criticism or opposition, be that from his servants or his allies. They
simply received instructions which they had to obey. In 1684 Duke
Victor Amadeus of Savoy was curtly informed that the king counted on
the speedy extermination of the heretics in the Waldensian valleys of
Piedmont, and that he would lend him French troops and a general for
this purpose. Catinat then invaded the valleys and treated the Walden-
sians in such a manner that even the French ambassador in Turin pro-
tested ; but the royal reply was : ‘It is fortunate for the Duke of Savoy that
illness is saving him a great deal of trouble with the rebels of the valleys,
and I have no doubt that he will easily console himself for the loss of
subjects who can be replaced by others far more dependable.’ 2 Louis was
to experience to his own cost that — although France lost only a small
percentage of her population through the emigration of the Huguenots —
it was far from easy to replace their skills, or to compensate for the loss of
the Protestant sailors who had served in the French fleet. Catholic
Frenchmen could not fill the gap created through the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes. The horror which the king’s policy aroused in Europe
was the cement that bound together the coalitions formed against him,
and many distinguished Huguenot soldiers, such as Marshal Schomberg,
served in the allied forces against France. If Louis sincerely believed that
he was executing God’s will, it was not France but her enemies who
reaped the benefit from it. It is true that none of the European States of
the time granted political rights and citizenship regardless of creed. The
Popish Plot showed to what lengths victimisation of Catholics could go
even in England, but by comparison with the dragonnades its terror rather
paled. Since the Thirty Years War Europe had not seen religious persecu-
tion applied on such a scale and accompanied by such horrors, and it was
to be the last of its kind until the persecution of the Jews two hundred and
fifty years later. If much of the outcry against Louis was partisan and
biased, it was also true that he was personally responsible for this policy,
and at least in the Protestant countries diversity of belief was becoming
more accepted. Some small principalities, such as Transylvania, were
outstanding in the religious tolerance which they granted; and the very
fact that in a number of countries the religion of the ruler differed from
that of the majority of his subjects made for a more tolerant attitude on
the side of the authorities. The writings of Pierre Bayle, Locke and
1 CEuvres de Louis XIV, 11, 26 (1666).
* Quoted by W. H. Lewis, The Splendid Century, p. 46.
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INTRODUCTION
Leibniz had a similar effect. In spite of the policy of Louis XIV, a more
tolerant spirit began to spread and the storms of religious passion abated.
In a different sphere, however, the rulers of Europe not only admired the
system of Louis XIV, but eagerly sought to follow his example in their
own countries: in the field of government and administration. France
possessed the most highly developed bureaucracy in Europe, a factor
essential for the strengthening of princely power. Charles II in 1660
returned from his ‘travels’ deeply impressed by the French precepts of
government which he tried — without much success — to introduce in
England. Everywhere outside France the machine of the State was still
rudimentary, and what machinery there was was often controlled by
great noble families and more feudal than royal in character. By her
example France showed how the power of les grands could be curtailed,
how the king could make himself independent of Estates and great
families alike, how he could become absolute, basing his power on a
bureaucracy and a standing army. In Bavaria, where Maximilian I had
made himself absolute in the course of the Thirty Years War, his suc-
cessor, Ferdinand Maria (1651-79), summoned the diet for the last time
in 1669 and henceforth ruled without the Estates, in spite of their willing-
ness to grant him large sums of money. In Brandenburg, the Great
Elector, Frederick William (1640-88), broke the power of the Estates and
created a powerful military bureaucracy, the prototype of which was
furnished by the French intendants de Varmee. It was the exhaustion and
economic decline of his territories after the Thirty Years War that enabled
him to impose his will upon the country. In the devastated Palatinate and
the equally devastated margraviate of Baden-Durlach, the prince for
similar reasons could make himself absolute. The diet of the margraviate
met for the last time in 1668, that of the duchy of Holstein in 1675. Every-
where in the Empire princely officials began to supplant the machinery
provided by the Estates, and the State assumed an importance which it
had not possessed before the Thirty Years War. Even where the Estates
did not disappear as an institution, their powers declined. In the Habs-
burg territories the same process was inaugurated through the victories of
Ferdinand II and the Counter-Reformation over the local, largely
Protestant, Estates in the course of the Thirty Years War and continued
through the conquest of Hungary from the Turks, although there the
Estates retained some influence.
In Denmark too, it was after a war, during which the country had been
conquered and defeated, that absolutism was introduced; for the ruling
class, the nobility, refused to participate in the taxation required to reduce
the enormous debts resulting from the war. After the nobility’s resistance
to any constitutional change had been weakened, power was transferred
to King Frederick III (1648-70) by a treaty concluded with the three
Estates, and in 1665 the new constitution was completed and promulgated
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
as the ‘King’s Law’. In Sweden also, an unsuccessful war and the large
debts caused by it brought about the adoption of absolute government, a
quarter of a century later than in Denmark. His financial plight forced
Charles XI (1660-97) to compel the nobility to return the alienated Crown
lands, a policy which was supported by the other Estates, so that in both
Scandinavian countries absolutism grew on the basis of an alliance of the
monarchy with the unprivileged classes. In Brandenburg, on the other
hand, and to a certain extent also in Bavaria, absolute government was
established on the foundation of a working alliance between the prince
and the nobility : its privileges, especially exemption from taxation, were
confirmed, and it became a service nobility which filled the higher posts in
State and army ; while in France Louis XIV excluded the nobility from the
government, in which he employed members of the bourgeoisie. In
Sweden, as in Bavaria and Brandenburg, the transition to absolute govern-
ment took many years, during which the diets gradually lost their
importance and met for shorter and shorter sessions. The introduction of
absolutism often seems to have been due less to a premeditated policy on
the side of the prince than to the force of circumstances, especially to the
great impoverishment of the Crown after a devastating or unsuccessful
war; of equal importance was the ruler’s desire to possess a standing army
so as to strengthen his position at home and abroad. Thus absolutism was
often established step by step, almost imperceptibly, and without any
declaration to that effect.
In many countries the Estates continued to meet, but they were only a
shadow of the past — such as the Cortes of Spain and Portugal, or the diets
of the Habsburg territories in central Europe. Even in England Charles II,
at the end of his reign, succeeded in making himself independent of
parliament and in remodelling the borough charters, a step designed to
guarantee him willing parliaments in the future; the opposition party, the
Whigs, overreached themselves, were defeated by the king’s astute tactics
and crushed by persecution. It was only James’s stubbornness which
ruined his brother’s achievements. Until the revolution of 1688 England’s
constitutional development was not so divergent from that of the Con-
tinent, but showed similar traits. The establishment of a standing army
strengthened the hands of Charles II, as it did those of Charles XI of
Sweden and of the Great Elector. Absolute government seemed to
triumph all over Europe, and the doctrine of the Divine Right of kings
reached its apex. French and other political writers as well as the teach-
ings of the established churches provided the ideological basis on which
the new type of monarchy could be erected. It was the Glorious Revolu-
tion and the writings of John Locke that marked the end of the dominance
of the accepted doctrine.
There were some European States — such as Switzerland, Venice and
Poland — where there was no trend towards greater centralisation or
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INTRODUCTION
greater monarchical power; but these were declining and comparatively
small countries, without much influence outside their own frontiers.
There was only one power which provided an exception from the general
trend: the United Provinces, an aristocratic republic with a federal con-
stitution. Indeed, its constitution was so federal that it was only the
predominance of the province of Holland which gave some coherence
and purpose to the whole structure, and the fact that in time of war — after
the revolution of 1672 — the House of Orange strongly reasserted its
influence and furnished the leadership which the provinces needed.
Throughout the seventeenth century the Dutch predominated in the
Baltic trade, which provided the fleets of Europe with timber and naval
stores, and in the trade with the East, which they conquered from the
Portuguese and from which they attempted to exclude the other nations.
If the French model was followed in other fields, in commerce and ship-
building the Dutch example was paramount. Their great trading com-
panies, especially the Dutch East India Company, found imitators from
France to Brandenburg, from Sweden to Portugal.
The strength of the United Provinces rested on their sound finances; at
a time when the revenues of all other European countries were weak and
unstable the Dutch were the great lenders and the payers of subsidies to
many countries. The Republic was always solvent; the companies were
always able to mobilise new financial resources; shares and stocks were
bought and sold as in no other European country. The Bank of Amster-
dam was the financial hub of Europe (and not only of Europe) and was
unrivalled by any similar institution in England or France. England
might try to exclude the Dutch from trade between her and the colonies,
but with little effect. As the governing class, the Regents, was closely con-
nected with the merchants and the money-lenders, the policy of the
Republic could be shaped in accordance with their interests. Success in
trade and enterprise led to an astonishing prosperity, still visible in the
patrician houses and along the grachten of Amsterdam, Delft, Dordrecht,
Haarlem, Leiden and other towns. It also led to a great flowering of the
arts, partly caused by the demand of the wealthy Dutch burghers for
portrait groups and interior decorations and their investment in paintings.
The portraits, the landscapes and seascapes, the pictures of inns and
burgher houses, of ships and urban life, immortalise the golden age of the
Dutch Republic. If French culture was severely aristocratic and if it
influenced above all the upper classes of Europe, Dutch culture was
largely middle-class ; but the Dutch influence in Europe was confined to
the sphere of trade and finance.
Even Dutch prosperity, however, was unable to stand the strain of
almost continuous warfare ; for the second half of the seventeenth century,
like the first, was an extremely belligerent period. In western Europe the
great struggle between France and Spain continued until 1659, and was
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renewed in 1667 when Louis XTV invaded the Spanish Netherlands after
the death of Philip IV. An enfeebled Spain also had to wage war against
the Portuguese who were fighting to gain their liberty: Portugal’s inde-
pendence was recognised only after twenty-eight years of war, in 1668,
never to be questioned again. The Portuguese in their turn were engaged
in long-drawn-out conflicts with the Dutch, during which they lost most
of their eastern empire, but succeeded in retaking Brazil. Only a few years
after the end of these wars in western Europe, Louis XIV once more
started a general conflagration by his invasion of the Dutch Republic in
1672, a war which lasted until 1678. The Republic was also engaged in
three naval wars with England. It was only during the last decade of the
period 1648-88 that peace returned to western Europe. It was soon to be
broken again by yet another attack of Louis XIV, which was fore-
shadowed during the interval of peace by the Reunions, the seizure of
Strassburg, and the claims which he put forward to the Palatinate. War-
fare was not only almost continuous, but often extremely ruthless. The
behaviour in particular of the French soldiery in the Netherlands and the
Palatinate caused a European outcry. That there was an outcry does per-
haps indicate that such military methods were no longer considered
normal. Yet the worst excesses of the time occured just after the end of
this period, during the early months of 1689, in the course of the second
devastation of the Palatinate.
Warfare was equally common in northern and eastern Europe; but —
apart from the issue of Baltic supremacy which concerned all the Western
powers — these wars were on the whole waged quite separately from those
in the West. The War of the North from 1655 to 1660 was not only a war of
Sweden against Poland and Denmark for supremacy in the North, but
gradually Russia, Brandenburg, the Habsburgs, and even Transylvania
were drawn into it; and a Dutch fleet intervened to help the Danes against
Holland’s rival in the Baltic, Sweden. The end of the war saw Sweden at
the height of her power and in the possession of the southern parts of the
Scandinavian peninsula; while Brandenburg had gained the sovereignty
over the duchy of Prussia — an acquisition of great importance for the
future, preparing the way for the foundation of the kingdom of Prussia at
the beginning of the eighteenth century. Another war between Denmark
and Sweden was unable to break the Swedish power in the Baltic which
remained dominated by the Swedish navy. Sweden’s extensive and scat-
tered empire around its coasts remained firmly under her control until the
end of the century and provided her with considerable revenues and a
flourishing trade. Although westernisation began in Russia under the tsars
of the House of Romanov in the second half of the seventeenth century,
there was as yet no sign of the destruction of the Swedish Empire, soon to
be accomplished by the most famous tsar of the Romanov family. Only
in the struggle between Poland, the Ottoman Empire and Russia for the
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INTRODUCTION
control of the Ukraine did Russia make substantial progress, to reach the
Dnieper, to gain Kiev on its western bank, and to establish her control
over the Cossacks to the south. While Russia was not yet a great power,
her future greatness was beginning to reveal itself, unnoticed by the West.
The West was vitally interested in the Baltic trade, and Sweden, through
her trade and her acquisition of territory in Germany at the Peace of
Westphalia, had become closely linked to the West; but the struggle for
the Ukraine and the approaches to the Black Sea was entirely outside the
purview of the Western powers.
There was, however, another great conflict in eastern Europe which did
find an echo in the West : the struggle against the Ottoman Turks, who at
this time experienced a remarkable revival under the able Grand Viziers
of the Kopriilu family. In the long-drawn-out war between the Republic
of Venice and the Turks over the possession of the island of Crete the
Venetians did not receive any effective help. The fortress of Candia was
finally surrendered in 1669, after great naval victories by the Turks which
transformed the eastern Mediterranean into a Turkish lake. Their advance
up the valley of the Danube, however, evoked some response when it
began to threaten Vienna. A French and numerous German contingents
participated in the battle of St Gotthard on the Raab (1664), where
General Montecuccoli inflicted an important defeat on the Turks; this was
followed by a peace lasting almost twenty years. The next great advance of
the Turks, in 1683, led them to Vienna itself, a feat which they had not
accomplished since the days of Suleiman the Magnificent. The news of the
siege of Vienna caused dismay in western Christendom. The Committee
of the Wurttemberg Estates interrupted its proceedings on account of
the ‘sad tidings that the Imperial residence Vienna was truly besieged
by 200,000 Turks and Tatars and the great consternation which this
caused’. 1 Yet little military help was sent from the West, Louis XIV had
no intention of extricating the Habsburgs from their difficulties, and it
was King John Sobieski of Poland who came to their rescue. This was the
last time that the Turks posed any threat to Europe: the period of the
decline of the Ottoman Empire had begun.
Unable to adapt themselves to the changing military tactics of the West
and to absorb the advances in science and technology made there, the
Turks were speedily driven from Hungary. The army which fought them
was not only Austrian or Habsburg in its composition, but contained con-
tingents of many German States and was led by Duke Charles of Lorraine,
the Elector Max Emanuel of Bavaria, Margrave Lords of Baden, and
Prince Eugene of Savoy. The States of the Empire recovered some of their
lost unity in the struggle against the Infidel ; perhaps it was the last time
that the crusading spirit manifested itself in Europe. Only the Most
Christian King chose to attack the Empire from the west so as to relieve
1 State Archives Stuttgart, Tomus Actorum, vol. xci, fo. 7 (12 July 1683).
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
the Turks from Habsburg pressure, and thus revived the old alliance
between Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent. Nor can it truthfully be
said that the Christians welcomed their liberators with open arms. The
Protestants and Dissenters of Hungary and Transylvania feared that the
Habsburgs would introduce the Counter-Reformation, and the Magyar
nobility, which had been engaged in continuous intrigues and revolts
against the Habsburgs, suspected that these would suppress the political
liberties of Hungary. One of those who fought in the battle of St Gotthard
complained bitterly, ‘because the population is anyhow desperate and
rather wishes for the arrival of the Turks than ours; they are banding
together everywhere, slaying and killing those who fall into their hands,
and thus they are doing almost more damage to us than the arch-enemy
himself. . .and it is impossible to describe in words the unreliability of the
treacherous Hungarians and Croats . . ,’. 1 The Christian armies were
indeed superior to those of the Muslims; but the Balkans continued to
present problems to the victors which they were unable to solve, and which
could not be solved by military means.
Europe was still very largely self-centred, and the European countries
traded principally among themselves. Yet this was the age of the great
overseas companies, and colonial conflicts began to play an increasingly
important part in the struggle between the great powers. In the East, the
Dutch East India Company had ousted the Portuguese from the Indo-
nesian archipelago and established a monopoly of the valuable spice trade
and of the trade with Japan; just after the middle of the seventeenth
century it occupied the Cape of Good Hope and the island of Ceylon, thus
securing the route to the Indies. In the trade with the East the English
East India Company occupied but the second place; in 1682 it was
expelled from Bantam in Java by the Dutch and thus lost its principal
foothold in Indonesia. The French and Portuguese were even weaker in
Asia, although in their missionary work there the Catholic countries were
far ahead of the Protestants. In America the picture was very different.
There the Portuguese were successful in recapturing Brazil from the
Dutch West India Company, which surrendered its last possessions to
them in 1654. Although the Dutch as well as the English and the French
succeeded in establishing themselves in the West Indies, the Spanish
colonial empire in America remained virtually intact. The decline of Spain
in Europe had no direct political repercussions in America, but much of
its trade passed into the hands of the interlopers.
In North America the Dutch were even more unsuccessful. New
Amsterdam and its outposts, founded at the beginning of the century, did
not develop into large Dutch settlements; before the outbreak of the
second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-7) they were occupied without much
resistance by the English, whose American colonies were much larger and
1 State Archives Stuttgart, Tomus Actorum, vol. uav, fos. 573-4 (letter of 8/1 8 August 1664).
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INTRODUCTION
more populous, and thus the gap between the English possessions along
the coast was closed. Although the Dutch succeeded in retaking New
Amsterdam, the Treaty of Breda (1667) confirmed it in English hands, and
as New York it became one of the most important towns of the English
American empire. For it was an empire which English statesmen were
building in America, and an imperial policy was slowly being evolved, in
spite of the centrifugal tendencies among the colonies and their pro-
prietors. The main threat to the English colonies did not come from the
Dutch, but from France. Even at a time when England and France were
close allies in Europe, the French threatened to bar English progress
across the Alleghenies and into the hinterland of their colonies. The
French position in Canada, however, was much weaker than that of the
English colonies, its population much smaller, much more dependent on
immigration and support from France (which were but meagre), and con-
tinuously hindered by interference from there. In North America it was
proved beyond doubt that State action and State intervention were not a
substitute for the spontaneous efforts of the English colonists and the
financial support which they received from the middle classes at home.
The Huguenots, who might have provided this spontaneous support for
the French colonies, were not permitted to emigrate to America. Even
French military support for Canada remained woefully inadequate, for
Louis’s preoccupation with Europe did not permit such a dispersal, so
that at the end of the period the colony was contracting, not expanding.
France remained above all a European power, and her influence, in the
main, confined to Europe.
It was only in the two maritime countries, where commerce and industry
were able to develop more freely, that we can truly speak of a ‘rise of the
middle classes’ during this period. Only in these two among the major
European States did the nobility and its standards not dominate the life
of society, did the State not interfere with the details of economic life, was
there sufficient ‘social mobility’ up and down the scale of society to per-
mit a spontaneous growth, did individual entrepreneurs engage in new
ventures at home and overseas on their own initiative, and did the trading
companies flourish without strong State support and protection. Even
the Whig aristocrats and Tory squires of Restoration England were
closely linked to the urban middle classes and their economic activities.
In other European countries, such as Spain, or Italy, or the Empire after
the Thirty Years War, the middle classes were declining; in eastern
Europe they had not yet come into being. In France, their ambitions were
too much confined to the buying of offices and titles and to becoming
State officials ; there was too little private investment and private capital
accumulation ; what surplus there might have been available was absorbed
by the large army and the heavy burdens imposed by almost continuous
warfare. Hence France, although much more advanced than the countries
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of central or eastern Europe, fell behind in the competition with the
maritime countries. In another vital field, that of science and technology
and its application to industry, Holland and England were also leading;
and that again seems to be connected with the more spontaneous econo-
mic climate which existed in these two countries, and with the social
progress which was being made there. For England, indeed, with Isaac
Newton, Robert Boyle, William Harvey, Richard Lower, Christopher
Wren, and the Royal Society (founded in 1660) this was a great age,
hardly matched by any other. France had her Descartes and Pascal, but
both belong to an earlier generation : that of Louis XIV did not produce
any great French scientists.
The period from 1648 to 1688 was the period of the greatness of France,
not only in the political and military sphere, but also in culture, literature
and art. Yet there were other fields which, from a more general point of
view, mattered most for the future — finance and economics, the social
structure, the development of the middle classes and of industry, overseas
trade and colonies, more diversity and tolerance in religion. In these, it
was not France who was leading Europe, but the two maritime powers,
Holland and England. That Holland would soon yield second place to
England was indicated, during this period, by the loss of her colonies in
America; but it was due, above all, to her more limited resources and her
smaller population, and also to the long-drawn-out wars in which the
United Provinces were involved because of the attacks of Louis XTV. It
was one of the ironies of history that they did not benefit France, but
Holland’s greatest commercial rival, another Protestant power which
Louis in vain hoped to lead back into the Catholic fold. In England the
result of this policy was not a strengthening of Catholicism, but a Protest-
ant revolution which led her firmly into the ranks of Louis’s enemies and
thus materially contributed to the failure of his ambitious plans. Thus
Louis XIV overreached himself, and upon the ascendancy of France there
followed the period of her decline. England and Holland, joined together
under the House of Orange, succeeded in defeating the greatest military
power of Europe. The year with which this volume closes was the year of
the Glorious Revolution: the writing was already on the wall.
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CHAPTER II
ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND POLICIES
I t is sometimes said that the landmarks of political history, such as
those which serve to delimit the period to which this volume is devoted,
have little or no relevance to economic history. This is a half-truth.
And it is especially mischievous if it leads to the supposition that the
economic history of nations can somehow be written without reference to
the actions of governments, as though economic life existed in a vacuum,
emptied of political contamination. It remains true that in certain aspects
of economic life political events and personalities made no real mark.
In the day-to-day or year-to-year life of English husbandman or Spanish
peasant it mattered little then that Charles of England should lose his
head or Charles of Spain his empire. In the forty years between the
Peace of Westphalia and the English Revolution, no innovation signifi-
cantly altered costs, output, or methods of production in any of the main
economic activities of Europe. It was not always for want of effort : what
science does today, the State tried vainly to stimulate then. This is not to
say that economic life remained wholly static; it is simply to stress both
that continuity and change have to be carefully balanced, and that if at
certain levels a slow evolution paid little heed to the explosions of political
history, at others those explosions were real enough. And for all the
inventions of ingenious men, there is no set of historical laws to guide us.
The first section of this chapter consists of a broad survey of the main
trends in population, agriculture, industry, trade, and finance. Here the
impact of State policy is virtually ignored. The second section examines
the nature of certain economic and social problems as they presented
themselves to the governments of the time, and the efforts made to solve
those problems. Finally, there is a brief discussion of the idea of ‘mercan-
tilism’ and its relationship to economic policy and economic thought.
From the sparse and heterogeneous population statistics which have
survived for the seventeenth century, it is possible to get a rough impres-
sion of the general demographic trends.
The sixteenth-century upsurge of population seems to have spent itself
by the 1630’s, in some areas still earlier, and there followed, in the middle
and later decades of the seventeenth century, a period of decline, stagna-
tion, or at best only slow growth over most of Europe. From the 1630’s
to the 1690’s, plague, war, famine, and other agents of death struck
periodically, and with more than usual harshness, at the peoples of
Europe, though their incidence varied markedly from area to area.
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After the severe attacks of plague in the i630’s, many parts of Europe
were again visited in the following three decades. London, Chester and
other English towns suffered further attack in 1 646-8 ; parts of Spain in
1648-50, Munich in 1649-50, Copenhagen in 1654, Amsterdam and
Leiden in 1655. Far more killing was the epidemic which broke upon
many regions of Italy in 1656-7. Liguria and the kingdom of Naples were
the worst hit : the town of Naples itself may have lost some 50 per cent of
its population. When the plague made its last spectacular appearance in
England in 1665-6, it is thought to have resulted in the deaths of perhaps
100,000 persons in Greater London. Elsewhere the attack was less severe,
though some other towns in the south-east suffered heavily. The Great
Plague in England marked the last of the big outbreaks in our period
though it certainly did not disappear from the European scene. Danzig,
for instance, which had suffered heavily in 1653 and 1657, was again
attacked in 1660, Amsterdam and Frankfurt in 1664 and 1666, southern
Spain in 1679-80, and Magdeburg and Leipzig, urban casualties of the
Thirty Years War, in 1680-1.
Recurrent and especially bloody warfare is one of the major themes of
seventeenth-century history. Yet as a direct killer war was of slight
importance; as an indirect agent of death some wars were very important.
The predominantly naval Anglo-Dutch Wars had almost certainly no
effect whatever on the demographic development of England and Holland;
but the Thirty Years War or the various wars which, during the next three
decades, swept across Poland and Prussia had significant demographic
and economic consequences for some areas of some of the countries
involved. Almost certainly far fewer people fell to the soldiery than to
the conditions which the soldiery helped to create. Warfare conducted in
the manner of the Thirty Years War had three main sorts of impact on
population. First, it stimulated emigration from the war zones to more
happily placed towns. Second, by placing a heavy burden on food supplies
and at the same time disrupting agriculture, it could readily turn a harvest
failure into a local famine. And third, by thus increasing population
movement and helping to lower already low standards of nutrition, it
provided ready channels for the growth and spread of infectious diseases. 1
The losses incurred during and after the Thirty Years War were thus
extremely complex in their nature and causation. In magnitude they
varied sharply from area to area. North-western Germany, north of a
line from Luxemburg to Lubeck, as well as the alpine areas of Switzerland
and Austria were hardly affected at all. Bohemia, Saxony, Silesia and
Moravia sustained only very moderate losses, though some towns, such as
Freiberg, lost heavily. The worst-affected regions lay along a line running
across Germany south-west to north-east, roughly from Strassburg to
Stralsund. Average losses of about 50 per cent have been estimated for
1 For further details, see below, ch. xvm, pp. 434-5.
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ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND POLICIES
Brandenburg, Magdeburg, Thuringia, Bavaria and Franconia; and of
60-70 per cent for Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Coburg, Hesse, Wurttem-
berg and the Palatinate. But these figures do not command general
agreement amongst historians and may well be too high. Nor are such
losses necessarily to be ascribed wholly to the war, its attendant circum-
stances or aftermath. The population of Augsburg, for example, averaged
some 45,000 during the first three decades of the century and only about
22,000 between 1630 and 1680, but it was already falling before the war.
Wide-ranging warfare did not end with the Peace of Westphalia, nor were
its effects confined to Germany. Parts of eastern France suffered from the
Thirty Years War; from Poland during the long years of fighting after
1648 comes the same dreary tale of devastated villages, deserted holdings,
migration and economic decline; and so, too, from Prussia after the
Swedish-Polish war of 1655-60. Farther west, the long-suffering Spanish
Netherlands suffered again in 1667. And with the wars which Louis XIV
let loose in 1672 the theme is taken up yet again: whereas peasants had
migrated to Holland from Saxony and Westphalia during the Thirty
Years War, now they fled thence to escape the advancing French; the
Palatinate, recovering only slowly from earlier devastations, was ravaged
once more in 1674 and yet again, and even more savagely, in 1688-9.
The harm wrought by warfare on population and economic life in
seventeenth-century Europe has been exaggerated, and this is especially
true of Germany and the Thirty Years War. War has been blamed for
much that was too readily assumed to mean death and was probably
migration; losses in one area have not been balanced against gains in
another; the extent of subsequent recovery has often been minimised; and
much has been ascribed to war that was mainly due to other causes.
Between the later sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries lie some of the
worst crop failures in European history. Caused in part by worsening
climatic conditions, especially violent rainstorms alternating with severe
drought, they had important demographic consequences. The most far-
reaching and destructive of the famines — such as those in the 1 590’s and
1690’s — occurred outside the years from 1648 to 1688 ; these years include,
nevertheless, three periods of harvest failures, some of which were severe
and widespread. Between 1648 and 1652 the crops failed in one country
after another. In Amsterdam and Paris, in Leipzig and Danzig grain
prices soared to famine levels. In England they reached their highest point
of the century in 1649; in Spain and Sweden alike the harvests were
disastrous. A decade of good harvests and falling prices was ended by
further crop failures in many parts of Europe, mainly between 1660 and
1663. The varying severity of this crisis reached a high point of seriousness
in France where there were local famines. A doctor from Blois wrote in
March 1662: ‘I have never seen anything that approaches the desolation
now existing at Blois, where there are 4000 [poor] who have flowed in
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
from neighbouring parishes. In the country the dearth is greater. The
peasantry have no bread. They pick up all kinds of meat scraps, and the
moment that a horse dies, they fall upon it and eat it.’ 1 Such descriptions
are not unique to France nor to 1662. After a longer period of better
harvests, the third wave of failures appeared around 1675-9. They were
less widespread and less acute: although, for example, food prices rose
sharply in Florence, Spain and parts of Germany and Sweden, England
and France were scarcely affected. Towards the end of the period there
were sporadic crop failures at various times, 1683-5 being poor years in
some countries, but there was little severe or pervasive shortage.
The significance of plague, war and famine is not to be measured simply
in population loss. The shifting and stirring of the population helped alike
to exacerbate the pressing problems of vagabondage, poverty, and poor
relief and to change the patterns of economic prosperity or decay. The
continuance of these patterns was in turn related to growth in numbers
after the killing waves had passed. Some areas, of course, did not recover
from their losses, but others experienced surges of population growth as
the birth-rate rose rapidly. And this could bring further burdens as the
proportion of children, already high, rose still higher, and the need for
food and work gained a fresh edge. Here, then, was the European popula-
tion of the time — numbering somewhere about 100 million in the con-
tinent as a whole — unstable, violently fluctuating, with a high proportion
of young people, and the low expectation of life (about 30 to 32 years, at
birth) resulting from high mortality rates.
The areas of loss and gain can be indicated only very generally. Spain,
Italy, the Spanish Netherlands, parts of Germany and the Habsburg
Empire, Poland and Hungary seem to have been areas both of net popula-
tion loss and of economic decline. But within these countries all was not
loss. Though Spain’s population is estimated to have fallen from about
8 million to about 6 million in the course of the century, most of this fall
occurring before the 1660’s, and although many of the towns of Castile
shared in this, Cadiz and Madrid both grew notably. Though Naples is
thought to have decayed from nearly 300,000 when the plague struck in
1656 to 186,000 in 1688, Venice, despite the plague of 1630, recovered, and
its population of about 130,000 in the 1690’s was not much less than
before 1630. As Milan decayed, so did Turin and Leghorn rise rapidly.
In Germany, whilst Augsburg, Erfurt and Nuremberg sank, Berlin, in
spite of earlier losses, grew rapidly to some 20,000 people in 1688; though
Danzig and Liibeck declined, Hamburg, Bremen and Vienna grew; though
many districts of Westphalia were hard hit, the town of Essen expanded.
France, England and Holland present broadly the opposite picture.
These were the rising countries, economically and politically, and their
1 Quoted by A. P. Usher, The History of the Grain Trade in France, 1400-17 10 (Harvard,
1913), p- 21°.
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populations, whatever precisely may have happened to them, probably
grew slowly or at worst only stagnated. They were spared the fiercest
excesses of war; France suffered no epidemics comparable to those which
ravaged Italy; in England harvest failures, after 1649, were relatively mild
in their impact; Dutch towns continued to grow and there was probably
a net immigration into the country, especially after the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, which helped to maintain the population. London
certainly grew, probably doubling its population between the i63o’s and
i69o’s to reach about half a million — a much more rapid growth than in
England as a whole — and thus making it and Paris the only European
cities of over 400,000 persons. The slightly upward movement in these
countries seems to have been shared, in the century as a whole, by Sweden,
Norway and Switzerland.
Throughout Europe agriculture continued to be the main economic
activity for most people; and its methods remained in 1688 very much what
they had been in 1 648. Indeed, the period is too short to be able to pin-
point meaningful changes in an age of very gradual technical evolution.
In some regions new crops or new techniques, often introduced in the
course of the sixteenth century, spread further afield, more land was
brought under cultivation, specialisation made some progress, and farming
was a profitable business. Dutch advances in the practice of land drainage
and reclamation, for example, already demonstrated successfully in earlier
decades, continued to be copied in England and France. In other regions
nature reasserted itself, the weeds came back and the ploughman was
gone; or, if he stayed, his methods remained crude and inefficient, and his
lot poverty-stricken and wretched even by the low standards of the time.
In Spain, for instance, the area under tillage fell and wool-growing was not
improved by the continued decay of the already crumbling organisation of
the Mesta; in Germany and Poland some of the ravaged districts did not
easily recover their agrarian potentialities in this period.
Over great areas of Europe the ancient arrangement of strips, open
fields and two- or three-yearly fallowing still prevailed, in one form or
another; it was interspersed, as in parts of northern France and western
Britain, with field systems derived from the Celtic in-field and out-field
cultivation, or with great areas of marsh, woodland, waste and rough
grazing, barely within any recognisable system of cultivation. Variations
abounded : differences by region and by nation, in farming methods and in
tenurial relationships. The Netherlands, and especially Flanders, appeared
to contemporaries as models of small-scale, intensive cultivation of such
specialised crops as vegetables, hops and fruit. The use of clover and other
‘artificial grasses’ to improve the quality of pasture spread from the Low
Countries to England at about this time. Another important agrarian
advance, often ascribed to the eighteenth century but which in fact made
its appearance in eastern England during this period, was the growing of
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such fodder crops as turnips within a field rotation. These practices were
as yet very far from common, though they were being increasingly
advocated by agricultural writers. The latter were a sign of the times
almost peculiar to England : Sir Richard Weston, John Worledge, William
Blith, Samuel Hartlib were some of a number of English authors active in
the mid-seventeenth century and with few counterparts elsewhere in
Europe. They drew heavily on the practices prevailing in parts of Flanders
and Holland, yet these countries themselves do not seem to have produced
a comparable literature of agrarian improvement.
The pattern of European specialisation and trade in foodstuff's was
modified during these years in a manner which matched the changing
fortunes of the different areas. Although eastern Europe remained the
major grain-growing region, grain exports from the Baltic ports declined.
Shipments from Danzig, chiefly of rye, reached their peak in 1618; after
severe fluctuations during the Thirty Years War and a very high figure in
1649, they fell off sharply in the i6so’s, and despite some recovery did not
again reach the levels of the earlier years of the century. Nevertheless,
these cereals remained vitally important to the European economy. The
trade in grain continued to be dominated by the Dutch, who carried it
home to help feed their own dense population, or re-exported it, especially
to the Mediterranean countries. France and England were normally self-
sufficient in cereals. Though still drawing on eastern European grain in
bad years, they produced during this period a growing surplus for export.
French grain periodically found its way to Holland, Spain or Portugal;
and in the r67o’s and 8o’s, a consistent, though small, surplus was shipped
from London, mainly to Holland and the American colonies. Animal
products or special crops continued to enter into foreign trade in amounts
which, although normally small, sometimes constituted important propor-
tions of the trade of the exporting country: butter and cheese from
Holland, hops from Flanders, cattle and beef from Ireland and, on a
larger scale, wines from France.
As would be expected from the nature of the demographic trends
sketched above, this period saw a temporary reversal of the steep and
century-long rise in food prices. After reaching their then highest points
in most countries of Europe between 1620 and 1650, grain prices for the
next forty years showed a stationary, or gently falling trend, despite some
very sharp year-to-year fluctuations. These conditions had varying im-
pacts upon different classes in the communities. The small peasant
producer, with inadequate reserves and selling on a generally depressed
market, was adversely affected; the wage-earning labourer may have
enjoyed some slight increase in real wages, provided that there was work
for him, and in the disturbed economic condition of the time there often
was not; for the landed proprietor there is little indication that the change
in the course of prices was in itself sufficiently marked to present any
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ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND POLICIES
serious problem or challenge. And, in the main, the relations between
landlord and tenant continued to evolve along the lines which had been
hammered out during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In Germany east of the Elbe, in Poland, and elsewhere in eastern
Europe the grip of the landowning nobility on a peasantry already reduced
to serfdom was not relaxed. In spite of some temporary reverses, the
Junkers of Brandenburg and Prussia were able to consolidate their power,
political and economic, and further to tighten their hold over their labour
force. Farther west, the French peasantry, though mainly untrammelled
by serfdom, was increasingly saddled with feudal burdens as landlords
continued to reconstitute their demesnes and, by a variety of practices,
secure a bigger share in the profits of the soil. The noblesse de robe and the
bourgeoisie increased their holdings of landed property. In the fertile
grain and vineyard areas around Dijon, for instance, the bourgeoisie by
investing in land contrived to improve both their social position and their
profits, as well as to help revive a region hit by the wars. For an important
section of the Swedish peasantry the threat of serfdom was dispersed as a
result of the reacquisition by the Crown of lands formerly alienated to the
nobility. Started in 1654 and continued more vigorously after 1680, this
policy of ‘reduction’ (from the Swedish reduktion ) was largely financial in
intent; although certainly not ruining the nobility, it had the effect of
markedly reducing their share of the land. 1 Everywhere there was
variety : alongside the large estate with a crop-sharing system — metayage
in France, latifundia in Spain or Italy — were prosperous, landowning
peasantry, themselves employing wage labour and hovering on the verge
of a higher social class; alongside the free peasantry of the province of
Holland were those in Overyssel and Guelderland whose freedom was cur-
tailed by sundry feudal burdens. In England, the manor and its feudal
structure more and more lost their significance, alike in estate manage-
ment and in tenurial relationships, as the landed estate and the leasehold
farm continued their gradual but triumphant progress. Many open fields
still remained, but enclosure, becoming notably more respectable in this
period, was increasingly for arable rather than for pasturage; it was much
advocated by the agricultural writers as a means to improved husbandry
which, in practice, it sometimes was. The modest yeoman and small
husbandman were hard pressed by falling prices and the inadequacy of
smallholdings, though their lot probably remained better than that of
many of their continental European counterparts. In the landed gentry,
reinforced regularly by prospering bourgeoisie, by lawyers and merchants,
living on and interested in the farming of their estates, England possessed
a unique rural class, the growing importance of which, as a whole, was
little disturbed in this period, despite the Civil War and its aftermath.
The distribution of change in industry and trade followed a geographical
1 See below, ch. xxn, pp. 521, 533-4.
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pattern similar to that in population and agriculture. The decaying
industries of Italy and Spain were already well set on the downward path;
they were not rescued during this period. Venetian cloth output, for
instance, already falling sharply in the i 620’ s , had sunk by the 1680’s to
little more than a tenth of its level a century or so earlier. Even in the
markets of the Levant it was being ousted by English, Dutch and, increas-
ingly, French cloth. Nor was the situation any better in Florence or
Milan; though some of the older centres kept their importance as pro-
ducers of luxury wares, and although some rural industry developed in the
north of Italy, there was not enough to counterbalance the general decay.
The brightest spot on the Italian scene was Leghorn. But it owed much
of its prosperity to a liberal policy which encouraged foreign merchants,
and to the business which they, especially the English, brought to the port
as it became the main distributing centre for English trade in the Medi-
terranean. Linked to the fate of Italian industry was the continued decay
of the Spanish market, as the decadence of Spain — political, military, and
economic — became even more evident under Philip IV and Charles II. 1
The textile and metal industries languished; the wool export trade suffered
from the falling Italian demand and, though continuing to supply the
northern industries, it was increasingly controlled by foreign merchants.
The colonial trade became more and more a bone to be quarrelled over by
any mercantile dogs other than Spanish— mainly Dutch, English and
French. The Spanish Netherlands, too, slipped still further from their
ancient glory. Ravaged by repeated wars, menaced by France, superseded
by Holland, their trade and industry declined. Hondschoote, for example,
with its famous textile industry already in decay, was finally despoiled by
the French in 1657; and Antwerp’s decline was further sealed by the
continued closing of the Scheldt, insisted on by the Dutch in 1648.
To the east the decline in the economic fortunes of the miscellaneous
jurisdictions which made up the Empire also continued. The business life
of the great south German cities was waning before the fury of war
attacked them ; and if Nuremberg and Augsburg recovered little of their
former wealth during these years, it was in part due to the general shift of
trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The Hanseatics had lost
the battle before war and the Swedes came to make matters worse. But
foreign powers and foreign merchants — Dutch, English, Swedish and
Danish — further tightened their hold on the great northern outlets of
German trade, from the Rhine to the Oder. The barriers to economic
advance were formidable: isolation from the new and expanding areas of
trade; inability to participate in the scramble for colonies; an economic
and political fragmentation which riddled the great riverine trade routes
with a multiplicity of toll stations, and saddled the lands of the Empire
with a confusing diversity of weights and measures and coinages; and an
1 See below, ch. xv, pp. 369-77.
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ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND POLICIES
impoverished and servile peasantry. The sensational nastiness of the
Thirty Years War must not be allowed to obscure the reality of these
barriers. Nor must the extent of absolute decline be exaggerated. The
Silesian linen industry became one of the leading textile manufactures of
Europe; Leipzig regained much of its prosperity, and Hamburg rose to
major commercial and financial importance; and the growing demand
for timber from the mercantile nations of western Europe played an
increasingly important role in sustaining the economy of the Baltic
hinterland.
Sweden’s spectacular foray into European power politics continued to
find most of its economic strength in copper and iron. Copper output
reached a peak in 1650 and, though falling slightly thereafter, remained at
a high level until 1687. After the technical innovations of the later
sixteenth century, the iron industry advanced rapidly and Swedish
exports dominated European supply in this period. The remaining, though
less important, staples of Swedish trade were tar and timber. Much of the
tar came from the forests of Swedish Finland ; and in this commodity, so
vital for shipbuilding, Sweden enjoyed a near-monopoly, as in copper and
iron. In timber, Norwegian production continued to overshadow that of
Sweden.
Woollens and worsteds still dominated English industry and trade.
Their lead shortened, however, especially towards the end of the period, as
metal wares, coal and grain took a larger, though still small, share in
exports; and, above all, as the re-export trade advanced rapidly. Imports
of tobacco and sugar from America and of calicoes and silks from India
rose strikingly, and London became the centre of a growing trade in the
re-export of these wares to Europe, as well as of the shipment of European
wares to the colonies.
These changes in the pattern of English trade were not peculiar to
England ; similar developments were occurring in France. They were part
of the first real challenge to Dutch commercial supremacy, a supremacy
which reached its zenith in the years around 1649 and which survived,
though not unscathed, the years here considered. Dutch ships and mer-
chants still dominated the grain and timber trades of the Baltic, the spice
trade from the East, the slave trade to the West Indies, and — that ‘chiefest
trade and principal Gold Mine of the United Provinces’ — the herring
fishery of the North Sea. But, if much of French commerce was in Dutch
hands in the 1640’s and i650’s, far more of it was in French hands in the
1670’s and 1680’s; merchants from Bordeaux and Nantes, as well as from
London and Bristol, began to play a growing role in the complex trade
with the Caribbean and West Africa; and international rivalry in Asia was
stiffened by the continued advance of the English East India Company and
the launching in 1664 of the French East India Company. 1
1 See below, ch. xvu, pp. 418-21, 427-9.
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Traffic within the European seas still accounted for easily the largest
share of Europe’s trade. But the new spurt in English and French
commercial expansion brought a small but growing demand from the
planters and settlers in America or the factories in India and Africa which
helped to stimulate the various home industries supplying the ordinary
wants of life: cloth or pots and pans, nails or paper. The growing
entrepot trade also encouraged processing industries to rival those in
Holland, sugar refining, for example, developing in France and England
during these years; and, though the greatest impact of imported Indian
textiles was not felt until later, their inflow was sufficiently large in
England in the 1680’s to provoke complaints and further efforts to
diversify the domestic products. At the same time as the output, and
import into Europe, of these Indian and American wares was rising their
prices were falling. The price of Virginian tobacco in London fell drastic-
ally between the early years of the century and the 1680’s; sugar and
calico were the subject of similar trends. These downward movements
reinforced the fall in agricultural prices and the mainly static, or only
very slightly falling, level of most industrial prices. Meanwhile some indus-
tries thrived behind protective barriers. In France the dreary aftermath
of the Fronde was succeeded by a new vigour in industrial and com-
mercial life, with renewed and more assertive State support. Many of
Colbert’s new industrial foundations — tapestries, lace, mirrors, luxury
fabrics — were often artificial and uneconomic; but the linen, silk, woollen,
paper and metal industries were feeding a widening export trade; and,
though they and other branches of economic life were hit by the folly and
tragedy of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 1 by that time
France was probably the greatest industrial producer in Europe.
The organisation of industry and trade underwent little basic change
during this period. In spite of certain large enterprises the unit of activity
remained generally small, appropriate to the technical and financial
circumstances of the time.
The existence of a number of large, State-chartered, monopolistic
trading-companies must not blind one to the steady advance of individual
merchants or partnerships, sometimes encroaching, ‘interloping’, on the
preserves of a company, sometimes operating outside its ambit. Within
European waters the giant organisation, joint-stock or ‘regulated’ in
form, lost power or failed to justify hopes. The English Merchant
Adventurers — who transferred their mart to Dordrecht in 1655 — were
already retreating in face of both the advancing interlopers and the general
opposition to privileged trade, when their monopoly was ended in 1689;
the Levant, Eastland and Russia Companies were also on the wane, the
Baltic trade, for instance, being in effect freed from the Eastland Company’s
grip in 1673. The high hopes placed by Colbert on the various trading-
1 See below, ch. vn, p. 141.
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companies which he founded were least fulfilled by those concerned with
European trade. In the struggle for colonial trade, on the other hand, the
big companies still dominated; and new ones appeared, notably in France,
to join the Dutch and English giants. 1 Even here, however, though State-
sponsored concerns, such as the English Royal African Company, made
headway in establishing trade, none achieved the wealth and prestige still
attaching to the great Dutch East India Company, and none was un-
troubled by merchants working illegally outside their control who
gradually secured more and more business.
In industry, whenever techniques allowed, some type of domestic or
putting-out arrangement was increasingly to be found. The great majority
of textiles, in Flanders or Languedoc, in Devonshire or Silesia, were made
by the wage-labour of spinning and weaving peasants working in their
homes, and finished by skilled, urban artisans. Throughout Europe
thousands of tiny mills testified to the growing possibilities of harnessing
wind or water (mainly the latter) to industrial processes: corn-grinding,
fulling or paper-making, slitting iron or crushing ore. And the occasional
larger unit, as in iron- or glass-making, reflected the technical need for
concentration. There were, of course, a few giant enterprises. Some were
State-supported, such as the great arsenals and dockyards made necessary
by the growing navies of the age; others owed their scale to the character
of some outstanding entrepreneur. One of the most striking was that built
up in Sweden by the Dutch merchant, financier, industrialist and arms
magnate, Louis de Geer. The greatest ironmaster in Sweden, shipper,
shipbuilder and manufacturer of various wares, he supplied arms from his
Amsterdam warehouses to contestants in the Thirty Years War, to
Portuguese revolutionaries and to English royalists. And, though he
founded a famous Swedish noble house, it was in his native Amsterdam
that he died in 1652.
At one end of the scale of finance were still the countless petty dealings
of ordinary men: peasants, labourers, weavers, usually in debt to local
tradesmen or farmers or merchant putters-out of yarn; and as industry
grew or the peasant was burdened with dues and taxes, so, whether in
Wiltshire or in the Beauvaisis, the credit network grew. At the other end of
the scale, just as de Geer made a fortune from the military needs of cease-
lessly belligerent States, so did great financiers, such as Barthelemy
Hervart, banker to Mazarin, prosper on their financial needs. The
emergence of the London bankers, some from the ranks of the goldsmiths,
is perhaps the main theme in English financial history during this period ;
private bankers handling public debts rose to importance after the
Restoration. Yet, in spite of projects, neither in England nor in France
were there established at this time public banks such as the famous Bank
of Amsterdam, the ancient foundations at Genoa and Venice, the pros-
1 See below, pp. 36-7.
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pering Bank of Hamburg, or the bank which, founded in Sweden in 1656,
was to produce, five years later, the first short-lived issue of paper money
in Europe, and in 1668 to become the Bank of Sweden. In 1683 the Bank
of Amsterdam started making advances against bullion deposits for which
were issued receipts that then came to circulate widely in the merchant
community. The outbreak of war in 1672, meanwhile, had brought some-
thing of a financial crisis : the Hamburg bank had temporarily to suspend
payments; the Stop of the Exchequer brought losses to some of the
London goldsmiths, though it certainly did not ruin them. No State
could afford to offend too many financiers too often.
The problems of public finance presented themselves urgently and
repeatedly to all governments : how to raise money for mounting national
or dynastic ambitions, for courtly extravagances, above all for war.
Attempts to economise were sporadic and feeble; expenditure normally
rose and income had to match it. And the bigger revenues had to be raised
rapidly in societies with national incomes which grew only very slowly;
and moreover in which wealth was mainly held by small groups or classes
with claims to privilege and power which rulers none too secure could not
lightly ignore. The diverse solutions found to these problems often had
important consequences for the social and economic development of
countries, and fiscal needs left their mark on many wider aspects of policy.
To increase direct taxes on land and property was a familiar gambit, but
one with limited possibilities. For where, as in France or Spain, the
nobility and clergy were exempt from much taxation, to try to tax them
thus was either dangerous or unthinkable, and it was not always easy to
squeeze more from the poorer classes; whilst in England the power of a
parliament dominated by landowning payers of property taxes was a real
brake on both royal and Cromwellian ambitions.
As the largest single source of French revenues, the taille was of obvious
interest to Colbert’s reforming zeal. Levied variously and riddled with
anomalies and exemptions, it was in effect paid by the mass of the
ordinary country people, above those at the very bottom, of whom it was
pointless to demand revenue. The nobility and clergy were exempt, and it
was evaded by a great number of the rich, the powerful and the somehow
privileged. Colbert managed to reduce the rates and improve the collec-
tion of the taille. But war demands pushed it up again, slightly in 1667-8,
more in 1 674-8 ; nevertheless it remained at the end of his administration
about 20 per cent lower than the high level it had reached under Fouquet.
Yet, even when reduced, Colbert’s more rigorous enforcement and collec-
tion had the effect of making its weight more onerous to a class bearing a
growing burden of other dues and taxes. So when wartime increases came,
protest grew, tension was screwed up, and unpaid arrears mounted. In
contrast to the taille, the English direct taxes did not exempt the rich at
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ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND POLICIES
the expense of the poor, and their yield was thus potentially the more
elastic. None of these early taxes tapped efficiently the incomes of
merchants, financiers or lawyers — people in whose hands the accumula-
tion of wealth was probably at its most rapid. But the monthly assessment,
introduced in 1644, continuing as the main tax of the Protectorate and
sometimes used under Charles II and William III, may well have been
better than most. The heavy demands of Cromwell’s wars kept it at a high
level ; not until the last years of the Interregnum, however, did its collec-
tion fall seriously in arrears, and it was not the subject of major complaints.
The same cannot be said of the hearth-tax, introduced in 1662 to supple-
ment the evidently inadequate revenue granted to Charles II at the
Restoration. Penetrating farther down the social scale than did either the
assessment or the ancient subsidy, it rapidly caused trouble, proved
difficult to collect, and was further disliked as an innovation from the
Continent.
Still more fruitful of public outcry and discontent were some of the
indirect taxes and varied fiscal expedients to which the rulers of the day
had frequent resort. Some form of excise or sales tax increasingly com-
mended itself to governments during this period. There were various
reasons for this. The limited possibilities of direct property taxes left
customs or excise duties with an especial value as sources of tax revenue.
But to push up the yield of the customs demanded a vigorously growing
overseas trade or great scope for increases in rates above their current
level, or both. Few countries were in such a position, though England
was probably nearest to it. Tariff manipulation was also, precisely at this
time, becoming increasingly important as a weapon in international
economic rivalry, sometimes to the detriment of its importance in
domestic finance. Moreover, antiquated methods of customs administra-
tion sometimes effectively barred any attempt to raise revenues appreciably,
without thoroughgoing reform. So the tax on internal production or sales
of goods in everyday consumption, tapping a wider range of wealth than
land or property taxes, and leaving room for reduction in export duties, or
other manoeuvres in the customs field, was introduced or its use extended.
A most formidable array of excise duties, levied upon a great range of
ordinary wares, formed a vital part of the Dutch taxation system. Fiscal
measures which would have burdened overseas trade were normally
eschewed in favour of those which passed the burden on to the cost of
living of the ordinary man. The generally low level of customs duties —
essential to the country’s mercantile economy — had, however, to be
increased on the outbreak of war in 1651. But Dutch trade was no longer
expanding rapidly, and the customs revenue tended to decline. This was,
therefore, an unpromising source of State finance, even had manipulation
of it for fiscal purposes been politically or economically expedient. Con-
sequently, excise duties were raised and extended during this period ; they
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were increasingly resented, and they made the United Provinces in the age
of their greatness one of the most heavily taxed nations of Europe.
A similar story of rising indirect taxation can be heard from other
countries. Spanish courtly extravagance as well as persistent and unsuc-
cessful warfare conducted within a declining economy and a decaying
empire meant taxation on a scale which could not fail to make matters
worse. Both the millones and the alcabala were raised during this period;
the latter reached 14 per cent by 1664, and as a sales tax payable on all
transactions represented a stifling burden on economic life. In France,
whilst Colbert was reducing the taille, he was raising the much-hated
gabelle and the aides, quadrupling the yield of the latter between 1661 and
1683. 1 With little foreign trade, and much of that stagnant, and a nobility
largely exempt from taxation, the lands of the Great Elector could hardly
yield him much money from customs or direct taxes. So taxation in
general and the excise in particular — the latter accounted for over 60 per
cent of all the taxes of the duchy of Prussia in the i670’s — loomed large
in his struggle with the Estates. The price of his victory and his wars was a
heavy burden of taxation most of which was borne by the towns and the
peasantry. Although in England the yield of the customs was made to
rise, both Cromwellian and Stuart revenues would have been woefully
inadequate without the excise. Introduced in 1643 to finance the Civil
War, it rapidly became a prop for the finance of other wars, as well as the
object of riots. At the Restoration only the excise on beer and certain other
beverages was retained as an internal indirect tax, but its yield rose substan-
tially so that by the 1 670’s it accounted for about one-third of total revenue.
That well-tried method of raising urgent revenue, the sale of offices,
continued to be most extensively exploited in France. Many carried
exemption from the taille \ many were created and sold in an effort to tide
over the virtual State bankruptcy at the time of the first Fronde; and
Colbert, despite the reforms which he introduced before the war against
Holland made a swift increase of revenue urgent, found himself ultimately
unable to dispense with a device which, by aiding a revenue-hungry State,
created a place-hunting bourgeoisie. Elsewhere this practice, though far
from unknown, did not usually provide a significant share of State
income, although the fiscal woes of the Spanish government brought its
office-selling activity to a maximum during this period. Akin to the sale of
offices was the farming-out of the right to collect taxes. It remained a
standard technique of achieving two ends: screwing-up the yield of taxes,
and anticipating the revenue by borrowing from the tax-farmers — who were
naturally, therefore, amongst the most-hated men of the time. In Holland
the excise had long been farmed out and continued to be. In England the
customs-farmers, removed during the Interregnum, returned in 1662,
though departing for ever in 1671 ; but for much of the period the excise
1 For the French taxes, see below, ch. x, pp. 230-1, 242.
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was fanned and so was, intermittently, the hearth-tax. The collection of
the French indirect taxes remained in the hands of tax-farmers; and in
spite of his zeal in clearing up Fouquet’s mess, Colbert was soon adding
to their numbers. In 1674, for example, a State monopoly of the sale of
tobacco was created and farmed to a syndicate of financiers: it brought
riots and it brought a growing revenue. And his important edict of 1673
requiring that all trades should be organised into gilds to which statutes
would be granted in return for a fee — the collection of which he duly
farmed out — was a fiscal device wholly akin to the numerous grants for
industrial regulation or gild monopolies made in England under Elizabeth I
and the early Stuarts.
Fiscal measures could be enumerated at length : in England the sale by
the Long Parliament of Crown, episcopal and delinquents’ lands; in
Sweden the re-acquisition of Crown lands ; Colbert’s reorganisation of the
royal demesne, with a resulting massive increase in its income ; Oropesa’s
attempts in the 1680’s to bring order to Spanish finances, efforts ending
inevitably in unpopularity, dismissal and the obstinate refusal of Spanish
revenues to rise. But there remains to be considered the important
question of State borrowing.
The Dutch were far ahead of the rest of Europe in the efficiency of their
system of public borrowing: without it they would not have survived.
Despite the burden of taxation and great size of the national debt, not
only did people continue to invest in public loans at low rates of interest,
but it proved possible to lower the rates still further. Following the
example of the province of Holland, the States General lowered their rate
in 1649 to 5 per cent; after the increase of debt arising from the first Anglo-
Dutch War, de Witt managed, not without opposition, to lower it to
4 per cent in 1655; and another conversion operation reduced it to
3I per cent in 1672. Meanwhile, some city loans were subscribed to at
still lower rates, such as that of Amsterdam floated at 3 per cent in 1664.
By contrast, their English rivals, with no effective system of public funded
debt, muddled along as before. During the Protectorate sundry mer-
chants advanced money against the security of specific taxes; and
Charles II borrowed from goldsmiths’ banks or East India Company
magnates. The ‘public faith bills’ of the Interregnum were a dreary failure
at 8 per cent; and an over-issue of Exchequer orders culminated in the
‘Stop’ of 1672. This failure to organise effective public borrowing was an
important element in weakening English power, and thereby fostered the
ignominious scrambles of royal diplomacy by which after 1675 Charles II
became a pensioner of Louis XIV. In their own arrangements for public
borrowings the French made no notable advance during this period.
Failure to pay interest due on the rentes helped to precipitate the Fronde
of 1648-9; corruption, venality and disorder marked French finances
under Mazarin and Fouquet. Colbert attacked rentes and rentiers, and
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substantially reduced the interest burden of the State. But the negligible
response to a public loan offered at si per cent in 1672 and to an issue of
rentes at 6| per cent in 1674 may serve to illustrate the weak credit of
le roi soleil at a time when he was attacking the nation with the best credit
in Europe.
Closely allied to the problem of State finance was that of money: how
to maintain or preferably increase the amount of specie within the country.
Shortage of money could hinder the payment of taxes or lead to deflation
and depression in economic life. The influx of gold and silver from
America had dribbled down into insignificance. Taken in conjunction
with the probably increasing volume of economic activity in Europe as a
whole, the certainly growing need for precious metals as trade with the
East, the Levant, and the Baltic expanded, and the marked rise in
government tax collection and expenditure, this meant an increasing
demand for, and a decreasing supply of, precious metal for circulating
media. There was, therefore, in the course of the century, a notable
growth in the use both of credit transactions and of non-precious coinage
metals, especially copper.
In Spain Philip IV inflated still further the already large quantities of
velldn. This copper coinage seems to have accounted for over 90 per cent
of the money used there throughout the period ; precious metals virtually
disappeared from circulation; the premium on silver in terms of velldn
multiplied fivefold between 1650 and 1680; and a vacillating policy of
alternating inflations and deflations added extreme monetary instability
to economic decadence. 1 In France Colbert was troubled by a shortage
of money in the economy, despite a great increase in coinage between 1640
and 1680 and some inflow of bullion from Spain. Much of the circulating
media, especially in the i66o’s and 1670’s, comprised debased silver and
copper coins (there was a large coinage of copper between 1655 and
1658), and there were many complaints of good gold and silver leaving
the country. The best Dutch coins were in demand everywhere and were
exported to be used in commercial transactions in Scotland or India, in
Russia or the Mediterranean. By a reform of 1 659 the Flemish rixdollar
and ducatoon, which had been finding their way in increasing numbers
into Dutch circulation, were formally included in the monetary system of
the Republic; and the long prevailing difference between the ‘bank
money’ and ‘current money’ was legalised. In England the guinea made
its debut — a product of the gold of the newly formed African Company;
coins with milled edges — already used in France — were introduced in
1663 ; mint charges were abolished; and in 1672 and 1684 halfpennies and
farthings of copper and tin were added to the coinage. The most bizarre
development took place in Sweden. Here the introduction in 1625 of
what was virtually a copper standard — intended both to raise the foreign
1 See below, ch. xv, pp. 370-2.
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ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND POLICIES
price of copper and maintain the level of production — rapidly led to a
copper coinage, largely displacing silver, and with coins of fantastic size
and weight: the io -daler piece weighed about 43 lb. and the standard,
rectangular 2-dale r coin in 1649 measured about 9i inches across.
Reactions to the problem of controlling the flow of precious metals over
national frontiers varied from country to country. Although the Dutch
made occasional gestures of control, in practice they continued to allow
almost full freedom for such movements : gold and silver from Europe and
the New World flowed into Holland and much of it flowed out again to
finance the trade or supply the mints of the Western world. In England
the old prohibition of the export of bullion was at last abandoned in 1663,
partly under the pressure of the East India Company, and partly as a
belated recognition in law of what had long happened in fact.
The continuing Spanish prohibition on export remained an example of
legislative futility in the face of an outflow evident to all Europe. In
France, too, ‘bullionist’ views still prevailed in government circles; as
much alarm was generated by the outflow of treasure in the Levant trade,
as was approval by its inflow through the trade with Cadiz. 1 Though
allowing certain exceptions, Colbert continued the policy of banning the
export of coin and bullion, and strove, usually vainly, to ensure that
French commerce should everywhere be carried on through the export of
French wares rather than of French money.
These efforts formed an integral part not simply of monetary, but also
of commercial policy. To the governments of the day two interrelated
tasks presented themselves for solution: how to acquire the largest
national share of what was commonly seen as a more or less fixed amount
of international trade; and how so to control the national share that it
resulted in a favourable balance of trade and a net import of precious
metals. A further complication for those engaged in a wider struggle was
the need to extend the control to colonial trade. None of these problems
was new to this period, nor were the answers without historical precedent.
But it was at this time that some of the first and biggest blows were struck
in the battle for economic supremacy in Europe.
The English Navigation Act of 1651 required that all imports should
come directly from their country of production or normal first shipment ;
that all products of Asia, Africa and America were to be imported only in
ships owned and manned by Englishmen or men of the colonies; and it
had various provisions designed to keep the fishing and coastal trades in
English hands. It drew upon national aspirations — readily identifiable
with public interest — as well as upon the claims of trading groups, such as
the Levant and Eastland Companies, who were eager for a diminution of
competing foreign imports. Its timing, and that of the war which followed,
owed something to current business depression. The Act struck at the
1 Cp. below, ch. xv, p. 376; ch. xvu, p. 402.
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Dutch; and in the war which it helped to precipitate Dutch trade and
shipping suffered more than English. But in the long run, by proving
unworkable, it paved the way for the modified and more enforceable
Navigation Act of 1660 which, with the related Acts of 1662, 1663, 1664
and 1673, formed the core of what was later rationalised as the ‘Naviga-
tion Laws’ or the ‘Old Colonial System’.
By these laws trade with the colonies was to be limited to English or
colonial ships with predominantly English crews ; and it was required that
certain enumerated goods — sugar, tobacco, cotton, ginger, indigo and
other dye-woods — be exported from the colonies only to England or
another English colony. The Staple Act of 1663 applied the old formula
of the staple town to colonial trade in the interests of English businessmen :
European wares were not to be shipped directly to the colonies, but taken
first to the mother country, and then shipped thence in English-built ships.
Certain specified European goods were to be brought to England only in
English ships or ships of the country of origin; the import of certain
goods from Hamburg and Amsterdam was prohibited completely. The
Act of 1673, imposing duties on enumerated goods when shipped from
one colony to another, was mainly concerned with setting up a staff to
enforce the restrictions on colonial trade.
In this body of legislation there was scarcely a new idea. Spain had long
sought to keep foreigners out of her colonial trade; and plenty of prece-
dents can be found, in England, France and elsewhere, for efforts to
encourage native shipping. The English legislation, however, earned a
greater and more enduring importance: because English industry, trade
and shipping were growing rapidly it was becoming possible for England
to supply her colonies with more and more of their needs, and thus in
turn possible to secure some enforcement of the laws, such as was quite
impossible for Spain. Although the English Navigation Laws were often
broken and had often to be amended, and although they probably made
little difference to English commerce in Africa, Asia or the Levant, there
can be little doubt that by effectively linking colonial trade to the mother
country they did benefit English trade in America, that they warded off
competition in Europe, and helped to build up London’s entrepot trade.
French policy was equally active in this international economic struggle.
The well-tried technique of creating chartered companies with monopol-
istic powers and the promise or reality of State support in pushing national
trade against foreign rivals was exploited by various countries, and not
least by Colbert. Liquidating the remnants of earlier companies, and
with an envious eye on the Dutch East India Company, he set up both
East and West India Companies in 1664, a company for trading in North
Africa in 1665, the Company of the North in 1669, and Levant and
Senegal Companies in 1670 and 1673 respectively. Of the first two,
launched on a lavish scale, with vast powers and royal subscriptions, the
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Compagnie des Indes Orientales was a financial failure in this period,
though it provided the basis for later French achievements in India ; the
Compagnie des Indes Occident ales was dissolved in 1674 and the French
plantations became royal colonies. 1 Nevertheless, French Caribbean trade
and sugar production grew rapidly (though much of it was outside the
company) and the Dutch grip was weakened. As in the Spanish and
English colonies, an exclusive system was adopted : all foreign ships were
to be excluded from the French Antilles, a policy vigorously pursued by
Colbert with naval support. Again, as in English but not Spanish com-
merce, because French trade and shipping were growing and increasingly
able to play many of the parts assigned to them, some fair degree of suc-
cess in enforcement was achieved, though not without periodic strife. Of
the remaining companies, the Compagnie du Nord was the most important.
Its creation was part of Colbert’s massive efforts to build up the navy; its
main intended role was to dislodge the Dutch hold upon the trade in
Baltic timber and naval stores, a task in which it did not really succeed.
By the later 1670’s the company was virtually defunct though its privileges
were not finally revoked until 1689.
Sweden, Denmark and Brandenburg all apparently possessed com-
panies for trade in Africa, India or the West Indies, sporadically active in
this period; but in fact they were largely enterprises by Dutch merchants
seeking to operate outside the ambits of the Dutch East and West India
Companies. In England, the growing dislike of monopolistic organisation
prevented much recourse to the creation of new companies. The only
major creations— apart from the inevitable and unsuccessful fishing com-
panies designed to capture the fishing business from the Dutch — were the
Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered in 1670, and the Royal African
Company, launched in 1672. The former spent much of its early life
fighting for existence with French settlers in Canada; 2 and the African
Company until about 1689 enjoyed a success which, economically, was
probably more apparent than real, though, in terms of the international
trade struggle, it certainly helped to increase English participation in the
slave trade.
In the intervals between wars, commercial treaties tried by negotiation
to secure ends unachieved by more drastic means. Between 1654 and
1656 Cromwell signed treaties with Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Holland
and France, of which the most important was probably that with Portugal,
negotiated from a position of strength in 1654. 3 It forced the Portuguese
to grant substantial freedom of trade to English merchants in Portugal and
in Portuguese colonies ; and it marked the start of English dominance in
Portuguese commerce, a dominance unimpaired by the treaty between
Holland and Portugal in 1661 by which the Dutch were also admitted to
1 See below, ch. xiv, pp. 357, 361. * See below, ch. xrv, pp. 359-66.
3 See below, ch. xvi, p. 394.
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Portuguese trade. The Franco-Dutch and Anglo-Dutch treaties of 1662
did little to stem the tide of growing commercial enmity; and that which
ended the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1 667 was partly a tribute to mutual
financial exhaustion in warfare. In a sense it marked the end of an era in
Anglo-Dutch economic conflict, not because wars or treaties had solved
the problems, but because they were to fall into the background in the face
of the looming ambitions of Louis XIV and Colbert. The treaties which
the latter negotiated with Denmark and Sweden in 1663 formed a minor
part of his efforts to push French trade in the Baltic. Growing economic
tension between France and England was reflected in the futile negotia-
tions for a commercial treaty which went on intermittently between 1663
and 1674. And after the Franco-Dutch conflict, such political gains as
Louis XIV secured at Nymegen in 1678 must be set off against that
important blow to Colbert’s economic ambitions: the abandonment of
the tariff of 1667. 1
Tariffs, tariff wars, and trade embargoes are multi-purpose economic
weapons. During this period they were used in the interest of revenue, the
balance of trade, and shipping, or in order to encourage and protect
industry.
Colbert was a major exponent of their use. He sought, first, to bring
order to the muddled accretion of tariffs and dues, internal and external,
which hampered French economic life; and, second, to deploy tariffs as
defensive weapons around French industry and as offensive weapons
against Dutch and English trade. The main instrument for his first task
was the tariff of 1664; for his second, that of 1667. Neither of these
tariffs was primarily concerned with raising revenue. Although the 1664
reform applied only to the area of the cinq grosses fermes it went a long
way towards consolidating the many and various duties of that area into a
single, simplified tariff. Its general tendency was slightly protective,
rather more than slightly for textiles. The 1667 tariff was protective to the
point of aggression. It applied to fewer goods, but rates of duty were often
doubled and it was particularly directed against imported textiles.
Although leaving undisturbed the confusion of duties outside the cinq
grosses fermes, it covered the whole of France. And it led to a heightening
of international economic tension, a tension further aggravated in 1670-1
by Colbert’s strengthening of the preferential sugar duties established in
1665, thus encouraging French refineries and plantation trade and hitting
at the important Dutch sugar interests. Retaliatory measures against
French wines and brandies followed in 1671-2. Just as this intensifying
economic rivalry was a most important element in precipitating the
ensuing war, so was the abandonment of the 1667 tariff a severe blow to
Colbert who, in the first flush of war enthusiasm, had regaled his master
with a detailed dream of what French might would do with Dutch commerce.
1 See below, ch. ex, p. 219; ch. xu, p. 296.
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In Anglo-French rivalry, too, the 1667 tariff was a landmark. A short
volley of trade embargoes in 1648-9 was followed by a temporary truce in
commercial hostilities. But increases in French duties on English cloth in
1654, 1664 and, especially, 1667 fanned the flames of an anti-French
agitation amongst influential mercantile interests in London. Anglo-
French trade was represented, with more heat than accuracy, as having
an unfavourable balance for England and as causing thereby a drain of
precious metals to France. In 1678 the main French imports into England
were prohibited on the grounds that they ‘exhausted the treasure of the
realm’. Although repeal came in 1685, this was only a brief pause in
a worsening situation. From 1689 onwards embargoes or prohibitive
duties were piled upon Anglo-French trade. And it was not until then that
English tariffs, as a whole, showed any markedly protectionist character.
Tariffs not only invite retaliation but, as a device for industrial protec-
tion, they suggest the pre-existence of industries worth protecting. Perhaps
only France could hope to use them successfully at this time, for it came
nearest to the contemporary ideal of a country blessed with all its needs,
as well as possessing a great industrial potential. In Holland protective
industrial tariffs were incompatible with other demands of this entrepot
empire; the English could not afford to invite more retaliation against a
commerce already provided with the armament of the Navigation Laws.
But if few governments could hope successfully to foster industry by these
methods this did not stop them trying. Yet even France found itself unable
to dispense with Dutch-supplied wares; and the government of Branden-
burg was forced drastically to modify the many prohibitions on imported
manufactures which, imposed in the first flush of the Great Elector’s suc-
cess, failed to nourish the desired growth of native industries. In many
countries, unable or unwilling to adopt measures of Colbertian rigour, the
same general tendency was apparent: duties on the export of manufac-
tured wares and the import of necessary raw materials were lowered ; and
those on the import of manufactured goods and the export of necessary
raw materials raised. Such a trend was apparent in Sweden, especially
from the 1650’s and 1660’s onwards: exports of copper and brass wares,
for example, were taxed less than exports of unworked metal; even in
Spain where, under Philip IV, customs policy had come in effect to favour
imports by foreign merchants, efforts were made in the 1 68o’s to protect
native silk and woollen industries. The English prohibition on the export
of wool, fuller’s earth and other raw materials was continued by Cromwell
and embodied in an Act of Parliament after the Restoration, although
efforts to prevent the export of unwrought leather were abandoned in
1668.
Methods more direct than commercial policy were currently in vogue for
the encouragement, protection or regulation of economic activity, and
Louis XIV’s France provides the most striking example of their use. In
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Colbert’s vast vision of an ordered and majestic economy industry
loomed large. In pursuit of his vision, gilds were supported, monopolies
created, privileges granted, subsidies paid out, and industrial life bom-
barded with an unrelenting barrage of highly detailed regulations. Most
spectacular were the workshops set up for the making of luxury wares:
tapestries, elaborate furniture, rugs, pottery, Venetian glass and mirrors.
To this end, new life was put into the Gobelins and the Savonnerie which
flowered into manufactures royales; similar enterprises were set up or
supported at Beauvais and Aubusson; Venetian workers were lured to
France (despite the efforts of the Venetian republic to ensure that they
stayed in Venice) and a privileged mirror-making company started: by
1680 Colbert was boasting that this particular manufacture royale was
depriving Venice of one million livres per year. In fact, however, these
luxury manufactures had more splendour than economic importance to
France as a whole; their economic value is not to be confused with their
great aesthetic and cultural influence in Europe.
To Colbert’s way of thinking it also seemed important that his country-
men should not have to buy foreign cloth. So Van Robais was lured from
the Netherlands and the large, highly privileged and soon famous
establishment developed at Abbeville to make types of cloth then pro-
duced in England and Holland; a company was set up and subsidised to
make serges in Burgundy ; and the Languedoc industry was given bounties
to stimulate its exports to the Levant. The Lyons silk industry prospered
on vast royal orders arranged by Colbert himself; the iron industry was
given some protection (Swedish iron could not be dispensed with) ; State
foundries were created for cannon manufacture; and at Rochefort,
Toulon and Brest were set up the immense arsenals and dockyards which
were amongst the biggest industrial establishments of the age. In striving
for the regulation of industry as a part of its promotion, Colbert exhibited
his usual economic conservatism. He took the existing creaky machinery
and fashioned from it a vast apparatus, centrally controlled and operating
through the intendants, the newly created inspectors of manufactures, and
the gilds. No industry attracted more of his regulative zeal than woollen
textiles. In the 1660’s detailed rules in the medieval manner were sent out
to numerous towns ; they were followed by corresponding national regula-
tions, stressing the maintenance of uniform standards and the need for
gild organisations. Although the edict of 1673 1 was primarily fiscal in
intent, it was wholly in the logic of Colbert’s industrial views. The num-
ber of gilds increased during his era and continued to do so afterwards.
At the same time they were tending to become exclusive organisations of
gild masters, used by the central government to discipline the workers.
This was in turn paralleled by the growth of journeymen’s organisations.
Some of these, especially in such skilled crafts as papermaking, began to
1 See above, p. 33.
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conduct strikes; and the heightening of industrial tension came to be
answered by further reglements.
Varied examples of similar but lesser attempts to promote industry and
trade may be culled from all over Europe. Economic authorities were set
up: the Council of Trade in England in 1650, the Kommerskollegium in
Sweden in 1651, the Kommerzkolleg in Vienna in 1665. There were efforts
to sustain or create economic activity with State support in Saxony, the
Palatinate, and Brandenburg; foundations of privileged companies
included that for silk manufacture set up in Munich in 1665; the immigra-
tion of skilled artisans was encouraged with particular vigour in England,
Holland and Brandenburg, to attract Protestant refugees, both before and
after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes ; the nobility was permitted or
encouraged to participate in trade or industry, as in France and Spain;
canals were built, none such vast undertakings as the Canal des Deux Mers
constructed between 1666 and 1681, but including that which the Great
Elector had built to join the Spree and the Oder — and thus lin k Berlin and
Breslau. Almost everywhere regulation was seen as the inseparable brother
of industrial encouragement. The Dutch, for example, minutely regulated
their fishing industry so as to maintain the quality, reputation, and price
of products known and sold throughout Europe. Their textile industry, in
Leiden and Amsterdam, remained subject to gild control, with its halls
where cloth was inspected and sealed to check its conformity to carefully
regulated specifications. Similar control exercised in Venice and other
urban centres of textile manufacture in Italy, though continued with the
intention of benefiting the industry by maintaining quality, in practice
hampered it from adaptation to new demands by insisting on the con-
tinued manufacture of old and expensive types of cloth no longer in
demand. Although in many areas rural textile manufacture was slipping
away from gild control, and although newer industries such as sugar-
refining or gunpowder-making were often free of it, it was only in England
that there was a continuing and nation-wide move away from State or
municipal regulations. The gilds continued to decline and the English
government, though no less anxious than others to promote national
economic power, tended more and more to do this by commercial policy
rather than direct industrial subventions or similar devices. Character-
istically, its biggest direct interest in industrial activity was represented by
the naval dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Deptford, which were
greatly expanded during this period.
To divorce economic from social history is neither fruitful nor sensible.
As governments grappled with economic problems, so were they involved
with social questions. In practice they were affected in three main ways at
this time : poor relief, the maintenance of employment, and the provision
of food in time of emergency. Their efforts must be seen against a
background of chronic under-employment and widespread poverty; of
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societies in which much labour was casual, and mobs and riots an
endemic threat to a public order often precariously maintained by
authoritarian regimes. To keep people from ‘stealing and starving’, as a
contemporary put it, was a policy which commended itself for more
reasons than those of morality. And the confusion and instability of these
decades brought, in many parts of Europe, a notable activity in social
policy.
Particularly evident in this war-torn era was a new vigour imparted to
old policies aimed at repressing beggars, vagrants, idlers — the able-bodied
unemployed. Itcould be seen in England after the Civil War and the murky
years of 1648-9, and it was embodied in the Settlement Act of 1662; in
France Colbert pursued the idle with edicts depressingly familiar in con-
tent ; alike in the Bohemia of the Emperor and the Sweden of the Vasas
there were complaints about beggars and policies for their suppression.
Corporal punishment and/or expulsion from town or parish remained the
standard recipe, and increasing ferocity was no prerogative of countries
embracing the severer sorts of Protestantism. The period saw a striking
increase in the erection of various types of workhouses and the more
or less compulsory incarceration therein of poor people. The famous
Hopital of Paris was set up in 1 656 ; in 1 673 it contained over 6400 inmates,
as well as others in various annexed foundations, and catered for a range
of persons stretching from prostitutes to foundling children, from the old
and infirm to the able-bodied poor who worked at various trades. Many
other workhouses, similar in type but smaller in size, were founded,
particularly from the i650’s onwards, not only in other French towns but
in towns all over Europe: in Holland and Switzerland, in Prussia and
Austria. In England the establishment of Houses of Correction had made
little progress by the Restoration; thereafter, criticism of the growing
burden of the poor-rate for out-relief led to the setting up of public
workhouses, similar to the London Bridewell. The motives for starting all
these institutions were mixed : religious charity ; the desire to sweep the
streets clear of a growing flock of potentially dangerous vagrants; the
hope that the practice of a trade by the inmates would contribute to the
country’s industry, usually textiles. In practice they did little to relieve
poverty by the provision of work, and still less to augment wealth by the
encouragement of industry.
Attempts to control the trade in foodstuffs mainly followed traditional
lines. There was much regulation of internal trade, though practices
varied greatly ; but the familiar alternation of permitted exports during
periods of good harvests, and forbidden exports during periods of bad,
remained the customary technique. That these decades saw a more than
usual freedom of export was due primarily to the falling grain prices and
the comparatively long series of good harvests between the failures, rather
than to any general access of ‘free trade’ ideas. The crisis years around
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1647-50, when the links between dear food and rioting were demonstrated
in many parts of Europe, were followed by the widespread removal of
export prohibitions during the good harvests of the 1650’s. The bad
failure of 1661-3 brought renewed controls, but then came long periods
of freedom : in the lands of the Great Elector there were no prohibitions
on grain exports from 1663 to 1673, few from 1677 to 1683, and none from
1 685 to 1 688 ; in France export was free from 1 669 to 1 674, alternated with
prohibitions from 1675 to 1683, and was free again from 1686 to 1689.
Socially motivated though this policy was, other influences bore upon it :
Spain’s dire need of grain forced her to encourage imports; Holland’s
interest in the international grain trade kept her trade in it substantially
free; the exporting interest of the Junkers told against ready export
prohibitions in the ports of northern Germany.
Few nations could or did attempt any consistent policy of agricultural
protection: Holland did protect its dairying with a stiff tariff on imports;
Denmark’s efforts at agrarian protection alternated with export pro-
hibitions; Sweden’s protective attempts in 1672 were short-lived; aside
from his efforts to stimulate grain exports by allowing them to be mainly
duty-free, Colbert’s agrarian interests lay less with foodstuffs than with
timber, as manifested by the celebrated and comprehensive ordinance of
1669 ( Ordonnance des Eaux et Forets). The general tendency in most
countries was towards the sporadic use of controls in the immediate
interest of consumers rather than of producers or merchants. Only one
country showed a noteworthy move in a different direction. From 1654
to 1670 English grain exports were allowed when prices were not above
certain specified levels; in 1670 export was permitted whatever the price;
and in 1673 there was introduced the system of granting bounties on
export which, although it lapsed in 1 68 1 , was revived in 1689. Meanwhile,
high duties were imposed on grain imports when prices were low, and low
duties when prices were high. Thus was laid down the Com Law policy
which was to last for so long and give protection to English farmers. At
the same time various restrictions on corn-dealing were also lifted.
Although controls were later temporarily imposed during emergencies,
the new policy survived and marked a clear step away from the older
method of trying to ensure distributive justice by controls to a new one
of protected expansion for the producer and reliance upon increased pro-
duction to meet the needs of the consumer.
The economic policies of this era, as indeed of the three centuries from
about 1500 to about 1800, are often assessed in terms of ‘mercantilism’
or ‘ the mercantile system ’ . In first developing the notion of the mercantile
system, Adam Smith in 1776 systematised certain aspects of the com-
mercial policies of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and
presented them as an absurdity in terms of economic efficiency; rather
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over a century later Schmoller and Cunningham gave mercantilism a lease
of intellectual life by presenting it as an ideal in terms of State-building.
Thereafter, the idea of mercantilism grew into a nebulous and all-
embracing entity, explaining little and concealing much. What does it
mean?
Behind the acts of policy considered here there certainly lay a mass of
attitudes and beliefs, common to many countries, about social and
economic matters. These notions, expressed in sundry books, pamphlets,
letters or edicts have been labelled in the history of economic thought, as
‘mercantilism’, just as have the policies themselves. But this miscellaneous
assortment of ideas, assumptions and prejudices was quite different from
the systematic analysis which is today called economics. It was different
in content, in its nature, its practitioners, and its relationship to policy.
It drew heavily upon two interrelated sources : empirical observations by
statesmen or merchants concerned with particular problems or engaged in
special pleading; and long-held and little-questioned assumptions about
economic life. The former included, for example, such practical matters as
the export of bullion and the shortage of coin, problems besetting
businessmen and finance ministers alike. There seems little need to dis-
tinguish them as peculiarly mercantilist. They have acquired this label
largely because the answers then found to those problems were judged by
later generations, anachronistically, in terms of classical liberal economics.
The first source drew, sometimes unconsciously, upon the second, the
underlying assumptions. Amongst the most important of these were: that
there was a more or less fixed volume of commerce, money, and economic
activity generally; that the circumstances of both supply and demand
were normally fairly inelastic; and that governments should govern in
economic matters as in political.
Such notions were not peculiar to this period or even to the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Some were assumptions far from unreason-
able in the general circumstances of economic life outside modem
industrialism; some were even then becoming out of touch with reality.
All were given particular historical significance by their continuing influ-
ence on the minds of those who were busy guiding the emergent States
and growing international rivalries of contemporary Europe. They cannot
be used alone to explain policy; they did not determine it. Economic
policy in practice was (and often still is) an indeterminate product of
economic assumptions and immediate problems, shaped by the person-
alities of outstanding men and timed, in part, by the transient prosperity
or depression of economic life. To attach so simple a label as ‘mercantil-
ism’ is to conceal the variety of forces which bore upon its formulation.
But an historical label once attached is difficult to detach; and this par-
ticular label may serve some classificatory purpose if tied on simply to
those attitudes, assumptions, and unsystematic notions which informed
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ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND POLICIES
contemporary actions. For they were certainly drawn upon, and their
rigidity, their essentially static and conservative nature helped to worsen
the tensions and conflicts of the time.
The period was fruitful in writings on economic matters, and many of
them showed an increasing interest in proposals for surveying and
exploiting national resources. With such many-sided authors as Johann
Joachim Becher, scientist and economist, active in the Vienna Kommerz-
kolleg, or Sir William Petty, doctor, inventor, economist, and much else
besides, we seem to be on the borderland between the new world of
scientific discovery and the old one of traditional assumptions. Petty,
along with John Graunt, pioneered in the 1660’s the field of social
statistics known at the time as ‘political arithmetic’; he was active in the
newly founded Royal Society which itself was only one of a number of
academies — the Academie des Sciences, the Florentine Accademia del
Cimento — which helped to bring a new stimulus to interest in economic
as well as scientific matters.
But in fact the influence on economic policy of this dawning scientific
world was negligible in this period. Nor were its basic economic ideas
much different then from the conventional assumptions embodied in
most contemporary writings. Such a work as Het Interest van Holland
(published in 1662, largely written by Pieter de la Court, but usually
ascribed to John de Witt under whose name it later appeared in French
and English translations) seems to breathe an air of economic liberalism.
But it was largely a patriotic tract in terms of the economic interests of a
merchant republic. There were exceptional writings, such as those of
Roger Coke. More typical was the sentiment expressed in the title of
von Homigk’s Osterreich iiber Alles wann es nur will (1684), or the
revealing sub-title of Andrew Yarranton’s England's Improvement by Sea
and Land; or How to beat the Dutch without fighting (1677). And the
vigorous activity of such a man as Sir George Downing, pursuing his
anti-Dutch policy and shaping the Navigation Laws, typified the reality
of mercantilism in practice.
Towering over all else as the embodiment of mercantilist policy was
Colbert. An administrator of genius, his perception of economic fife
nevertheless differed from the ordinary in no way save in its comprehen-
siveness. His views show all the rigidities of conventional mercantilist
writings; and some were decreasingly relevant to the slowly changing
world in which he wielded such power. Whilst the rapid opening-up of
new branches of trade in America and the East was palpably beginning to
make the ancient picture of fixity untrue, and while he himself was busy
founding companies to pursue those trades, he could still cling to the idea
of a fixed volume of commerce and regard the discovery of some new
trade as virtually impossible. And so logically, as he informed his master
in 1669: ‘le commerce cause un combat perpetuel en paix et en guerre
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entre les nations de l’Europe, k qui en emportera la meilleure partie. Les
Hollandois, Anglois et Francois sont les acteurs de ce combat .’ 1 In his
internal policy as well as his external, in his attitude to trade, industry and
poverty, all the generalised characteristics of mercantilism appear. And
his memory and influence perpetuated them. Just as Louis XIV’s France
provided political and cultural models for aspiring princelings, so was
Colbert’s economic etatisme a model for their orthodox economic con-
servatism. Colbert was perhaps the only true ‘mercantilist’ who ever
lived.
1 Lettres, Instructions et Memoires de Colbert, ed. P. Clement (Paris, 1861 ff.), vi, 266.
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CHAPTER III
THE SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT
T o the year 1648 belongs one of the dramatic experiments of the
scientific revolution. F. Perier, brother-in-law of Blaise Pascal by
whom the experiment had been proposed to him, climbed the
Puy-de-Dome in Auvergne bearing some glass tubes and a quantity of
mercury. He found as he ascended the mountain that at each successive
station the height of the mercury in his barometer was less, until at the
summit it stood at only 23 inches. This was ocular testimony to the truth
of the view that the column of mercury within the barometric tube was
supported by the pressure of the atmosphere outside the tube: the column
fell as it was carried higher in the ocean of air, so reducing that pressure.
The phenomenon itself had been discovered in Italy; there was nothing
very original in Pascal’s prediction that the height of the mercury would
decrease above sea-level; the experiment to test it was simple in the
extreme. Yet it had not been made before, it was made in France, and it
was widely publicised. It was characteristic of the time that it should be
so, for this was the peak of one of the great creative periods in French
science. The transformation of science had been first undertaken in Italy
and in Germany; religious fanaticism had stultified the promising renais-
sance of the sciences in the Paris of the mid-sixteenth century and
postponed to the reign of Louis XIII the development of anti- Aristotelian
philosophy, the pursuit of the great Copernican debate, and the introduc-
tion of experimental inquiry. From this time, however, as in politics,
manners and the arts of civilisation Paris became the arbiter of Europe, so
in science France rose to a commanding position, to retire in turn before
the challenge of English empiricism.
In thinking of French science in the seventeenth century it is inevitably
and correctly the name of Descartes that comes first to mind. 1 His works
and their influence have been discussed in the preceding volume, yet the
period from 1648 to 1688 may fittingly be called the age of Cartesianism.
Descartes died in 1650, six years after the publication of his Principia
Philosophiae, the bible of his followers ; it was in the next generation that
the forms of scientific explanation he had offered were assimilated and
questioned. They were accepted and taught most eagerly by his native
countrymen (with whom his relations had been kept close, during his
residence abroad, by the indefatigable Pere Marin Mersenne (1588—
1648)) and by his adopted countrymen, the Dutch. That, so far as science
is concerned, the Netherlands were a province of France paradoxically
1 For Descartes, see below, ch. rv, pp. 74-7; ch, xi, pp. 251-2.
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rendered justice to the influence which the Dordrecht schoolmaster, Isaac
Beeckman (1588-1637), had exercised over the intellect of the youthful
Descartes. Yet if his was the predominant new influence in France, it was
not the only one. Mersenne and others had equally drawn the attention of
French scientists to the discoveries of Galileo; Bacon and Harvey had
been read by them ; the new school of chemical philosophers was active.
Gassendi’s revival of Lucretian atomism was almost contemporaneous with
Descartes’s assertion of mechanistic principles, and he had able mathe-
matical rivals in Roberval, Desargues and Fermat. By mid-century
the French achievement in science was solid, and Mersenne’s provincial
correspondents testify to its strength beyond its centre in the capital.
By comparison the England of the boyhood of Newton, Boyle, Wren,
Ray and Hooke, riven by religious and political controversy, could boast
of little intellectual distinction. Bacon’s grand design remained unimple-
mented. The aged Harvey had abandoned science for the service of his
king, though in De Generatione Animalium (1651) the fruit of earlier years
of study was preserved. In London Gresham College was almost mori-
bund, while the ancient universities had been distracted by civil war and
religious purges. Only an audacious spirit could have foretold, from the
meetings of a philosophical club in London that began about 1645, and
from Cromwell’s later patronage of such men as John Wilkins and John
Wallis, the scientific eminence of the future Royal Society. Into England
also the influence of Descartes penetrated strongly, providing almost as
much evidence as there is of a stirring scientific outlook at this time. The
philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the diplomat Sir William Boswell were
among his correspondents; Henry More of Cambridge challenged him on
important points. A few years later Cambridge students were to complain
of the neglect of modern thinking there, because Descartes was not read
as he was at Oxford. Nevertheless, at either university the younger
Fellows of the early Royal Society like Newton and Hooke were brought
up on Descartes, to become uncompromising mechanical philosophers.
Few of Galileo’s friends and pupils in Italy outlived him; his death in
1642 (the year of Newton’s birth) marked the end of the epoch in which
Italy made her greatest contribution to the growth of modern science.
Elsewhere in Europe no serious scientist or philosopher any longer sub-
mitted inevitably to the force of Aristotelian arguments, or doubted the
greater plausibility of the Copemican hypothesis. In Italy the deadening
effect of clerical attitudes, foreseen by Galileo himself, became apparent.
Though there were gifted Italian scientists in the second half of the
seventeenth century, their work was confined to non-controversial
matters. An Italian astronomer, Giovanbattista Riccioli, produced the
last great defence of the old world-view ( Almagestum Novum, 1651) —
a massive and by no means foolish book — but no astronomer in Italy
contributed notably to the advancing flood of contrary observations and
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theory. As might be expected, the most active scientific centre was
Florence. There Vicenzo Viviani (1621-1703), one of Galileo’s last pupils,
was energetic in perpetuating his master’s fame. He was a major figure in
the Accademia del Cimento, a scientific society which under the patronage
of the Medici and with their financial support flourished in Florence from
1657 to 1667. It was a small and select society, and able to acquire some
excellent apparatus; but when ducal interest flagged it collapsed. As its
name suggests, the business of the society was to try experiments, mostly
in relation to physics, which it did in rather a planless fashion. Many of
the experiments on the motions of bodies suggested but not actually per-
formed by Galileo were tried — not always with success; the Torricellian
vacuum provided promising topics, and a number of experiments
described by Boyle in 1660 were repeated. Beautiful thermometers were
made for the academicians’ experiments on heat and cold; thermal
expansion, the incompressibility of water, the force of gunpowder, and
capillary attraction were examined. The Saggi di Naturali Esperienze
(1667), in which the proceedings of the academy were described, give an
interesting picture of the routine type of scientific experimenting of the
time. It yielded much new information — not least on the difficulty of
making and interpreting experiments; it confirmed much that was already
believed; but it settled no important questions, except perhaps the
question of whether or not ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. Much of the
experimentation at the Royal Society’s meetings in its early years was of
the same kind: the results were curious rather than conclusive.
The Saggi are striking examples of pure experimental reporting ; in its
object it is a book quite unlike anything published in the first phase of the
scientific revolution, just as the Accademia del Cimento is the first
example of a society existing simply to make co-operative experiments.
The best-known of older scientific societies, the Accademia dei Lincei of
which Galileo had been proud to be a member, had been more of a
fraternity: it never met in session, and its members never undertook a
common enterprise. The much larger scientific societies of the second half
of the century were, in varying degrees, all more ‘ Verulamian’ in design.
In Germany scientific interest was virtually limited, till the end of the
century, to the activity of such clubs in various cities; there were also
mathematicians and philosophers working at the universities, but none
was a major figure until Leibniz (1646-1716) emerged, a few years before
the end of this period. 1 Some of the German societies were devoted solely
to medicine; others were preoccupied (in a manner already rather old-
fashioned) with exploring the ‘secrets’ of nature by experiment, studying
physical phenomena that were still regarded as mysterious or paradoxical.
One or two of the books to which they gave rise, like Caspar Schott’s
Magia universalis naturae et artis (1657-9), had a fairly general currency.
1 For Leibniz, see below, ch. iv, pp. 82-5, ch. v, pp. 1 14-17, and ch. vi, pp. 145-6.
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In France, also, local scientific clubs existed beside the Academie Royale
des Sciences , whereas England was wholly dominated by the Royal
Society. The founders of the latter were deliberately mindful of Bacon’s
programme, though they were never to enjoy the financial endowment
that it required. The Royal Society undertook the compilation of the
accounts of craft-methods he had advocated; sent to the provinces and
abroad papers of Quaeries to be answered; drew up notes of advice to
travellers; and made lists of experiments that ought to be performed.
Their procedure demanded that an original experiment be performed at
each weekly meeting, and no conjecture or theory was to be advanced for
discussion unless suitable experiments were offered to substantiate it.
Experiments, anatomical dissections or natural curiosities reported by the
Fellows were ordered to be shown at Gresham College before the eyes of
all. Like the Saggi, the minutes of the Society’s meetings fill the reader
with bewilderment: it is clear that the Fellows wished to make and under-
stand experiments, but there is no continuity, no sense of scheme or
purpose, no connection between one topic of discussion, or one meeting,
and the next. There are obvious signs that experiment for its own sake
could obstruct organised, coherent, scientific investigation. In the end the
Fellows ceased trying to do any important work in common, in order to
pursue their own researches on which they still reported from time to
time.
In fact, the Royal Society never had formulated a detailed programme,
nor committed itself to a tight organisation. Having its origins in an
informal club of astronomers, physicians and mathematicians meeting in
or near Gresham College somewhat before 1648, some of whose members
moved in Cromwell’s time to Oxford where they encouraged scientific
pursuits in a number of brilliant young men, becoming first a formal and
then a chartered society (in 1660 and 1662), it yet never lost its easy,
general character. By no means all of the Fellows who assiduously
participated in the meetings were erudite in science, or professionally con-
cerned with scientific affairs. It is misleading to emphasise the amateurish-
ness and credulity of this body — though it revealed both qualities on
occasion — for generally discussion was sensible and well informed; yet
it was a society willing to devote itself to any topic that seized its fancy of
the moment, one in which any serious speaker might utter his mind, and
one largely independent of outside influences. In its independent and
liberal character the Royal Society was very different from the French
academy. This was of slightly later formation, though again there is a long
prehistory of regular scientific meetings in Paris. The men who met from
about 1648 under the presidency of the atomist philosopher Gassendi
(1592-1655) and the patronage of Habert de Montmor adopted a consti-
tution for their academy in 1657, and from about that time were in touch
with the founders of the Royal Society in England. The accession to
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personal power of Louis XIV, occurring at a time when dissension wit hin
the academy was strong, provided an opportunity for reorganisation
under the most exalted patronage. An appeal was made to Colbert, and
the Academie Roy ale des Sciences took shape in 1665-6. No earlier con-
stitution than that of 1699 is extant, but it seems that the number of
academicians was limited ; they were appointed by the Crown, received
pensions, and were expected to be constant in their attendance at meet-
ings, which were not normally open to visitors. There was no room for
virtuosi like Evelyn and Pepys. The Academie was an institution of the
State in a sense which the Royal Society was not, and though its members
were for the most part free to deliberate as they chose, they were on
occasion subject to official demands. The most distinguished of them, the
Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens (1629-95), ultimately resigned and
left Paris because of Louis XIV’s militarist policies. In compensation, the
Academie enjoyed some facilities that the Royal Society lacked. The
State financed an excellent astronomical observatory for its use, where
physical experiments were also made. Costly enterprises, like the measure-
ment of the length of meridian degrees in France and the astronomical
expedition to Cayenne, could be embarked upon with State aid. 1
Scientific societies, especially the national societies of England and
France, did not merely confer a local distinction upon scientific talent,
nor an opportunity for discussion and joint experiment; they had an
international importance too. The Academie numbered besides Huygens
two foreign astronomers, the Italian Cassini and the Dane Roemer; the
Royal Society elected foreign Fellows and maintained an extensive
correspondence with Europe and New England. What was accomplished
in Paris was regularly discussed in London, and vice versa. Latin, as well
as French, was still an effective international language among the learned ;
the works of Robert Boyle, for instance, published in English, were
reprinted in Latin at Amsterdam, as were the Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society, (The Academie issued no official memoirs until after
1699.) Scientists had long been linked by a close network of private
correspondence, and the device of making important results or arguments
known in this way was older than Galileo. Journals like the Journal des
Savants, the Philosophical Transactions (both begun in 1665) and the
German Acta Eruditorum (1684) gave the systematic letter, in the form
of a scientific article, a wider currency. Some of the most important work
of the second half of the seventeenth century was first described in the
Philosophical Transactions, which was adopted as a vehicle for publication
by Malpighi in Italy and Leeuwenhoek in Holland. This development in
communication was the most important that had occurred since the
1 Crown support for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (1675) was by contrast always
meagre; on the other hand, naval resources were given to Edmond Halley to enable him
to plot the position of stars in the southern sky.
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invention of printing, and one peculiarly adapted to scientific needs.
News, journals, and even books travelled much more rapidly than
formerly, when, for instance, reports of Galileo’s work were long in
arriving in France and northern Europe. The number of those who could
potentially take part in the scientific movement was enlarged accordingly,
the new journals being above all responsible for broadening its base.
This rapid expansion of scientific activity and publicity, marked by
royal visits to the academies, participation in them of the nobility, con-
troversies over the merits of old and new ways and opinions, propaganda
to farmers, manufacturers and navigators, and vehement international
rivalry among the leading scientists themselves, occurred mainly in the
sixth and seventh decades of the century. This was the great time of hope,
to be in turn followed by a slackening of vigour and enthusiasm. It was in
part one aspect of the recovery of Europe, in part an expression of the
national confidence otherwise well marked in France and England; more
particularly, it was the product of a feeling of triumphant emergence.
The men of Galileo’s time were still struggling against the oppression of
the past, and harassed by conservative criticism. They had had to aspire
to achievement ; their successors were buoyed up by the consciousness of
what had been achieved. They had but to go on, and did not doubt then-
ability to progress in ways already proved successful. This did not mean,
however, that at mid-century solider proofs of the ‘new philosophy’
were not still required. A demonstration of the motion of the earth was
still desired; the telescope’s revelation of the heavens was still imperfect;
the speculations of chemical philosophers and physicians were still in hot
debate; the circulation of the blood had still to be vindicated and inter-
preted; the fundamental theory of dynamics was still in urgent need of
exact statement. Above all, new ideas on the secret springs of nature
embraced in the mechanical philosophy were conflicting and insecure.
Cartesianism had still to be explored and tested. The mechanical philo-
sophy was the heart of the new scientific outlook. Much else, of out-
standing importance in contributing to a new picture of the natural
world, was limited to the range of observational description, pure
mathematical theory, or empirical experiment. Discoveries of this kind,
however important, could not by themselves offer the more profound
explanations of natural phenomena, such as Descartes had sought; they
could not elucidate the unchanging attributes of matter, nor the forces by
which nature invariably operates. To this extent, therefore, the deeper
tenets of the old philosophy like the schoolmen’s distinctions of form and
substance would be left inviolate unless they were challenged by a
theoretical structure of equal universality. Here was the real problem of
ideas, in the completion of the replacement of the old conception of the
natural order by a new one: a task that could necessarily be vindicated
only by its dramatic success.
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The success was to be won in Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica of 1687; won, in fact, in opposition to Cartesianism though
not to the scientific attitude that Descartes had inculcated. And this suc-
cess of the scientific revolution summarised many of its most recent
developments, though it was not immediately dependent on all of them.
Some of these, therefore, must be described first.
Galileo’s advocacy of Copemican astronomy had been brilliantly
effective; it had nullified all physical objections to the motion of the earth
and had brought forward fresh observational evidence against Ptolemy’s
heliostatic system, but it left a geometrical chaos. His celestial physics
was far too simple to be true. Descartes’s cosmology explained the nature
of stars, sun, planets, and earth ; it stated the cause of gravity, explained
why the planets revolved, and how their orbits preserved their stability;
but Descartes was no more concerned for the exactitude of astronomical
geometry than was Galileo. Neither physical theory could satisfy a
mathematical astronomer. While the key to the problem lay unperceived
in Kepler’s laws, planetary theory (the chief preoccupation of astrono-
mers for over 1500 years) was neglected; the telescope commanded all
attention. For many years it remained a small, crude instrument, with
which others often failed to see what Galileo had observed through his
favourite occhiale. Improvements were effected by using a magnifying
convex eye-lens in place of the concave lens of the Galilean telescope, and
through refinement of glass-working techniques. By about 1680 tele-
scopes 40 or 50 feet long were not uncommon, and monsters of 100 or
200 feet had been attempted. Magnification increased to the point where
the strange mystery of Saturn’s variable appearance could be resolved, 1
and even the division of its ring observed. Five satellites of this planet were
discovered, to add to the four famous ‘Medicean stars’ circling Jupiter.
Their orbits and periodic times could be measured accurately with the aid
of micrometers placed in the telescope’s field of vision ; from such observa-
tions on the satellites of Jupiter, Roemer deduced in 1676 that light took
about 20 minutes to traverse the earth’s orbit. Hevelius at Danzig studied
comets and selenography ; Flamsteed at Greenwich re-mapped the fixed
stars and observed the motion of the moon. Nearly another century was
to elapse before the exploring telescope could reach beyond the limits of
the solar system, but already enough, and accurate, information had been
collected by 1687 to enable the theory of universal gravitation to be
verified from the behaviour of planets, comets and the moon. Indeed,
astronomy permitted wider speculation : might not these other new worlds
it disclosed be inhabited too, as Fontenelle suggested in 1686? The most
powerful telescopes, leading the eye into the Milky Way and the farthest
depths of space could detect no propinquity in the stars, nor suggest any
1 It was caused by the varying inclination of the ring, which had caused Saturn sometimes
to appear as though accompanied by two adjacent stars.
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limit to their remoteness: might not the universe be infinite? Thus the
imaginings of Giordano Bruno became in a century transposed into sober
scientific conjecture.
Observational astronomy could falsify or support an explanation of its
complex, yet clearly patterned, phenomena; much else was required to
devise an explanation: not least was a suitable mathematical analysis.
Kepler at the beginning of the century had strained the resources of con-
ventional geometry in his struggle to determine the true shape of a
planetary orbit, yet the problems involved in setting out a physical theory
of planetary motions in mathematical form were far more severe.
Descartes had not attempted it; he had asserted that the planets were
borne around the sun in an ethereal vortex, without examining mathe-
matically the conditions of such motion. (Newton undertook this, and
proved that a vortex could not impart to the planets their observed
velocities.) The marriage of algebra and geometry effected by Descartes,
however, furnished the basis for mathematical procedures by which his
own physics could be disproved. The essence of the matter is that the
problem of handling mathematically the motions of bodies in curves was
advanced far towards solution. 1 The Greek geometers had solved this
problem for circular motion, the simplest case of all ; the later seventeenth-
century mathematicians were able to deal with more complex curves —
the parabola, ellipse and hyperbola (also well understood in antiquity),
the cycloid, the catenary and many more — and their methods were con-
venient and general. As it happened, the main features of the develop-
ments in pure mathematics that interested most mathematicians —
developments leading to the differential and integral calculus — were
brought sharply into focus by solving mechanical problems : the properties
of the curve traced by a point on a wheel rolling along a plane, or of the
curve assumed by a perfect chain, suspended by its ends. Though the
solution of such problems as these was mathematically difficult at the
time when they were proposed, the results were trivial for physics;
whereas the analogous problems arising when the action of forces on
bodies was studied were very important in physics.
Advanced mathematics was essential for the development of dynamical
theory, and in turn dynamical theory was essential to celestial mechanics.
In the earlier part of this period Huygens’s work in dynamics excelled;
though he did not display the highest genius for invention in pure mathe-
matics, Huygens’s accomplishments, like those of Newton, would clearly
have been impossible for anyone lacking great mathematical ability.
These accomplishments, not fully published until 1673 ( Horologium
1 As the Principia shows, this does not mean that every mathematical problem encoun-
tered in physics could be solved. Important areas of pure mathematical thought relevant
to contemporaiy physics were still almost unexplored at the end of the century. But in the
work of Huygens, Newton, Leibniz and their successors the major immediate obstacles were
overcome.
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Oscillatorium), were the result of researches begun early, about 1657.
Huygens made a full study of the dynamics of oscillating bodies (from
which incidentally he obtained a very accurate value for the acceleration
due to gravity) and went on to discover how to calculate the centripetal
acceleration of a body revolving in a circle. He also investigated the
impact of elastic and inelastic bodies, correcting the faulty principles
enunciated by Descartes. Huygens did not endeavour, however, to apply
his dynamical reasoning to the motions of celestial bodies; strangely
enough the problems they presented do not seem to have interested him,
although he was a keen observer and devoted much labour to the con-
struction of his own telescopes. Well aware as he was of the many errors
in Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae and of the a priori character of
Descartes’s theorisation, he nevertheless remained essentially a Cartesian,
above all in cosmology. Thus he stood firm in the conviction that
terrestrial gravity and the planetary revolutions were caused by an
ethereal vortex, and consequently the line of thought that Newton
followed was closed to him.
Possibly Huygens, like most scientists, was still insensitive to the crucial
significance of Kepler’s laws. About 1645 some astronomers recognised
that Kepler had solved the age-old problem of the true paths followed by
the planets, though in general the controversial issue was seen in terms of
the opposition of Copernicus and Galileo to Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe;
this polemical issue tended to obscure the merit of Kepler’s intricate
mathematical labours. The ellipticity of the orbits was commonly
accepted only from about 1660, as for example by the Italian Cartesian,
Alphonso Borelli, in 1666. More important, Kepler’s third law was
familiar to Newton at about the same moment. Like Huygens, Newton
calculated (in either 1665 or 1666) the centripetal acceleration ( conatus a
centro) of a body revolving in a circle; combining this information with
Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, 1 he recognised that the centri-
petal acceleration of each planet is proportional to the inverse square of
its mean distance from the sun.
Once this was understood, it was possible to introduce a great and
transforming conception. Descartes had been very well aware that, unless
they were impelled towards the sun by some force, the planets would
move in straight lines out into space — in fact it was Descartes who had
first correctly stated the law of inertia, of which this is a consequence. He
had accordingly explained how (as he thought) the ethereal vortex about
the sun would press the planet inwards, so that it could not escape but
must for ever revolve in an orbit. Newton had now satisfied himself that
this force towards the sun must always be inversely as the square of the
distance from the sun : he adventured into a totally new realm of ideas in
1 This states that among the planets there is a constant ratio between the cubes of their
mean distances from the sun, and their periods of revolution.
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proposing to identify it with that other force known as gravity on the
earth’s surface. If the earth had this gravitating power, why should it not
also belong to the vastly more massive sun, and to the other planets as
well? And why should not this power extend far from the immediate
vicinity of the body, indeed indefinitely into space? By a simple calcula-
tion, Newton again satisfied him self that if the earth exerted a gravita-
tional pull upon the moon, like that which it exerted upon heavy objects
near its surface, but reduced in the squared ratio of the moon’s distance,
this pull would be ‘pretty nearly’ of the magnitude necessary to prevent
the moon escaping from the earth altogether by its own motion. (If
Newton had known the size of the earth more correctly in 1666, the
agreement would have been almost complete.) If all these suppositions
were correct, there would be no function for the Cartesian ether to fulfil
in accounting for the planetary motions.
In 1666 Newton was by no means confident that they were correct; for
his trial on the lunar motion seemed to indicate a discrepancy. Other
means of checking them were not readily available at this point. He
lacked information on the detailed astronomical facts; more serious still,
his initial crude investigation was founded on the rough assumption of
circular motions, whereas he knew from Kepler that the planetary paths
are elliptical, and from the English astronomer Horrox that the moon’s
orbit is elliptical also. To analyse these actual motions dynamically raised
formidable mathematical difficulties. And there was a further serious
problem, which again relates Newton’s work to that of his predecessor,
Descartes. For it is certain that Newton was a mechanical philosopher:
that he believed all matter to be composed of particles, and every property
or attribute of matter to be explicable in terms of its component particles.
Gravity could be no exception; if aggregates of innumerable particles
possess a gravitating power, it must belong to each component particle.
Again, it would be far from easy to show how the gravitating properties of
large bodies arise from the gravitational power of the particles.
For such reasons Newton kept his ideas on celestial mechanics to him-
self for twenty years. He spoke to no one of a hypothesis that he knew he
could not prove; he seems even to have undervalued its importance.
There were really two tasks before him: one was to explore dynamics
more thoroughly, especially the dynamics of bodies moving under the
action of central forces (this he was to do in Book 1 of the Principia), and
further to show that these dynamical principles apply to the celestial
motions (this he did in Book m) ; the second task was to place the gravita-
tional force in its proper context as one of the fundamental natural forces,
associated with the ultimate particulate structure of bodies and hence
with their aggregate masses. This would have provided, to put it crudely,
the explanation of gravity. If he had done this, Newton’s work would
have been completely parallel to that of Descartes, though mathematically
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and dynamically far superior; but he was never able to accomplish the
second task to his satisfaction, and so was compelled to refer to the
universal gravitating power of bodies (whose laws of operation he defined)
as something that de facto exists, though it cannot be accounted for.
Following this policy, when he published the Principia Newton struck out
a Conclusion he had drafted in which gravitation was boldly handled as a
mechanical principle . 1 Newton’s status as a mechanical philosopher is
still clear in the Principia, but it was not to be exhibited in the form of con-
jectures about the cause of gravitation. It is hard not to believe that it was
a policy that Newton adopted with reluctance, that he would not have
preferred to be as complete as Descartes in explaining gravitation
mechanically, and it seems very likely that he did over these twenty years
search for such an explanation.
Newton’s thoughts on the mechanical cause of gravitation illustrate the
complexity of his reaction to Cartesian principles — a complexity evident
in the theorisation of other English scientists at this time. They accepted
and found useful the basic Cartesian premises: that matter is particulate;
that all the phenomena of nature arise from the interacting motions of the
particles ; that these motions are in accord with dynamical laws. They even
believed in an ether, a medium whose particles were immensely more
minute and more widely separated than those composing ordinary matter,
and might have other properties differentiating them from material
particles. (Newton himself postulated such an ether in his more specula-
tive pronouncements.) They were as convinced of the mechanism of the
universe as was Descartes himself: effect followed from cause in an
unbroken chain till the first causes were found in the structure and
properties of matter and ether. God was the First Cause, and His
creation of the universe not mechanical, but as the physiologist Nehemiah
Grew wrote (using a simile repeated over and over) :
[We need not think] that there is any Contradiction, when Philosophy teaches that
to be done by Nature ; which Religion, and the Sacred Scriptures, teach us to be done
by God; no more, than to say, That the Ballance of a Watch is moved by the next
Wheel, is to deny that Wheel, and the rest, to be moved by the Spring; and that
both the Spring, and all the other Parts, are caused to move together by the Maker
of them. So God may be truly the Cause of This Effect, although a Thousand other
Causes should be supposed to intervene: For all Nature is as one Great Engine,
made by, and held in His Hand. 2
These were broad ideas that all scientists of the later seventeenth century
held in common. Within their loose framework it was possible to move
more or less far away from the explanations of particular phenomena
devised by Descartes himself ; to reject the Cartesian ether, the vortices,
1 Some of the content of the rejected Conclusion is reflected in the Quaeries added to
Newton’s Opticks about twenty years later.
‘ The Anatomy of Plants (London, 1682), p. 80.
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the Cartesian conception of light, and so forth, while remaining a
mechanical philosopher and faithful to the basic tenets of Cartesian
science — perhaps more faithful than Descartes and some of his followers.
Thus to favour mechanical explanations did not necessarily mean that one
was content (as Gassendi was) with Greek atomism, or the closely woven
Cartesian system.
One of the first to make this abundantly clear was Robert Boyle
(1627-91). His adhesion to the mechanical philosophy was never in
doubt : he proclaimed it constantly, regarded the mechanical explanation
of phenomena as the core of the scientific revolution, and strove con-
stantly to illustrate its validity by experiment. Yet Boyle claimed to have
refrained from reading both Descartes and Gassendi in his early days as a
scientist in order to deliver his mind from the tyranny of systems. (One
might perhaps wonder how, then, he learnt to be a mechanical philo-
sopher.) In his first important scientific work (New Experiments Physico-
Mechanical touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects, 1660) Boyle
displayed the ingenuity in the design, execution and interpretation of
experiments, whether in physics or chemistry, that was to illuminate
science in the next thirty years ; he showed also scepticism concerning the
hypothetical or dogmatic conceptions of Descartes. He doubted the
Cartesian definition of matter by extension; he doubted the Cartesian
denial of the vacuum. His experiments did not permit him to deny the
Cartesian hypotheses outright; but he demanded that experiment be
brought forward to prove them. He himself, however, could not see how
the elasticity of air could be accounted for save by a mechanical hypo-
thesis based on its particulate composition.
The titles of Boyle’s later works themselves indicate the bent of his
theory: The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666), The Excellency and
Grounds of the Mechanical Philosophy (1674), The Mechanical Origin of
Volatility (1675), The Mechanical Production of Electricity (1675), The
Mechanical Origin of Heat and Cold (1675), and numerous others illus-
trate for various aspects of science the merits of mechanical explanations.
It was chemistry that especially attracted Boyle’s interest. Van Helmont
in the preceding generation had tried to frame a chemical philosophy ; but
Boyle was the first to borrow the ideas of his natural philosophy — the
mechanical or corpuscular philosophy — and use them to explain chemical
phenomena. His object, he declared, was to try ‘whether I could, by the
help of the corpuscular philosophy. . .associated with chymical experi-
ments, explicate some particular subjects more intelligibly, than they are
wont to be accounted for, either by the schools or the chymists’. 1 Boyle’s
theory of chemistry was essentially a physical one: it would explain a
chemical reaction by considering the physical structure of the reagents
1 Some Specimens of an Attempt to make Chymical Experiments useful to illustrate the
Notions of the Corpuscular Philosophy: Works (1772), 1, 356.
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and the motions of their particles. He neither employed nor invented
specifically chemical concepts — he rejected the notion of chemical
elements for example — except as these were necessary to describe the
materials he used and the experiments he made.
In this endeavour Boyle differed doubly from the chemists of his own
and earlier generations. In the first place chemical phenomena were
mainly of interest to him as evidence for a new philosophy of nature —
though he became indeed enormously interested in them for their own
sake; neither, however, did he regard chemistry as being primarily an art
or technique. Those chemical writers of the recent past who had ventured
upon elaborations of theory, such as Paracelsus and the less extravagant
van Helmont, had developed mysterious and esoteric explanations that
owed something to alchemy but little to rational philosophy. Reciprocally,
the philosophers had paid little attention to them. Other chemists,
writing as plain men undeceived by theoretical fancies, looked upon their
science as merely a complex of techniques — solution, distillation, pre-
cipitation, sublimation, crystallisation and so on — applied to specific
materials in order to obtain specific products. To most of these, chemistry
was the art of preparing effective medicaments, a function which they
treated in a wholly empirical fashion. Chemistry appeared in a similar
light to those who were interested in the scientific aspects of metallurgy,
dyeing, glass-making and other industries, in which notable empirical
advances were occurring at this time. Yet again, natural philosophers like
Descartes had paid little attention to the techniques of chemistry until
their significance was emphasised by Boyle. Working just at the moment
when existing explanations of chemical changes— such as combustion —
whether Aristotelian or Paracelsan, were beginning to seem rather feeble,
and when at least the manipulative part of chemistry was being described
in a full and rational manner, Boyle was able to demonstrate that this
neglected form of experiment could yield valuable information about the
nature of matter, and that an adequate theory of matter might account for
all the facts known to chemists. No other chemist had seen as deeply as
this. Boyle was indeed attempting to extend to the chemical range of
experience the ambition already dominant in physics: the explanation of
everything in terms of corpuscular structure and properties. This would
have made chemistry strictly parallel to, or even dependent upon, physics;
and the influence of Boyle’s mechanical philosophy applied to chemistry
explains why Newton in turn devoted so much attention to chemical
experiments and their explanation in terms of corpuscular structure and
forces.
It is easy to judge that this attempt to account for chemical facts in
terms of physical theory was premature. Though it was possible to
account for many single experiments — such as those on the solution of
metals in acids with the formation of salts — within the corpuscular
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hypothesis, and such explanations afforded useful insights into the general
nature of chemical reaction, neither Boyle nor Newton succeeded in
framing a complete theory solidly based on experimental facts. Their
loose texture of hypotheses never consolidated into a theory in a way
comparable with the theories of physical science. But this first attempt to
render chemistry a rational, mechanical science should not be regarded as
wholly futile. It was henceforward considered a proper branch of natural
philosophy, one that rapidly ceased to be marked by the singularities of
its early development. Moreover, the philosophical chemists like Boyle
proved themselves not less able than their empiricist colleagues in the
operations of the science, and so did much to remove from chemical
experimentation the atmosphere of workshop and kitchen.
A special problem, attracting much attention then as later, was that of
combustion. This could be described as a special kind of fermentation,
which like other examples of fermentation (and putrefaction) produced
heat by bringing about a violent agitation of the particles. This could again
be compared with the heat evolved in some chemical reactions as a result
of a similar agitation. Combustion, however, has a peculiar association
with a luminous glow or flame, and unlike other heat-producing processes
it can normally take place only in the presence of air. The fact that some
apparently cold substances — phosphorescent ones — are also luminous
was an additional complication. The English mechanical philosophers
(Hooke, Mayow, Boyle, and Newton) all had their say on this subject,
which was neither to be solved by their corpuscular hypothesis nor in the
seventeenth century. Nevertheless, their theories were consonant with a
purely kinetic idea of heat (whereas the eighteenth-century chemists had
to describe heat as an impalpable fluid). They ascribed combustion to the
presence of a particular type of ‘sulphureous’ particle in all combustible
matter, and they further recognized that the agitation of heat resulted
from the violent interaction of this type with a second, ‘nitrous’ type
found in air and other substances, especially nitre. Thus combustion and
flame-producing were explained by appeal to the same sort of mechanism
that was supposed to operate in other chemical reactions; and to some
extent the appearance of light itself was accounted for mechanically.
Light and its laws, its transmission and the formation of colours had
always offered a challenge to science, one that the Middle Ages had faced
more successfully than antiquity. Geometrical optics — the tracing of a
ray of light as represented by a straight line through reflections and
refractions — had reached a fair degree of precision while ideas about the
origin and nature of light were still crude. For geometrical optics does
not explain what light is, or how it is capable of giving rise to the sensation
of colour, or why it is reflected and refracted by liquid and solid bodies.
Physical theories accounting for such properties of light virtually begin
in the second half of the seventeenth century, upon a basis of Cartesian
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speculation. Descartes had done notable work in geometrical optics; in
his theory of light he explained it as a pressure in the material ether
emanating from the luminous source; physiologically the sensation of
light was caused by the action of this pressure on the optic nerve. His
successors were divided in opinion between two theories, each owing
something to his. In the emission theory light was regarded as a stream of
particles, issuing from the source in all directions. In the pulse theory
(where the analogy was with the transmission of sound) the source was
regarded as creating a pulsatory or vibratory motion in the ether, travel-
ling outwards from its centre. Both conceptions were, like that of
Descartes, mechanical; both involved particulate motions, and there was
not to be for a long time any possibility of experimental discrimination
between them.
Newton was the most powerful and fertile supporter of the emission
theory, though he recognised at length that no simple analogy between a
light-ray and a stream of particles could be made to work. He held that a
pulsatory theory could not account for the rectilinear propagation of
light. The reception of his optical discoveries, described in the Philo-
sophical Transactions in 1672, was hampered by his supposed attach-
ment to the emission theory. Against his critics Newton argued that his
discoveries were experimental facts or necessary inferences from these
facts standing entirely independent of hypotheses. From neat and con-
clusive experiments he reasoned that white light was not simple and
homogeneous, as had always been supposed, but was a mixture of
coloured constituents; these, when properly distinguished from each
other — as by passing a white beam through a glass prism— proved to be
truly simple and homogeneous: therefore, colour was not caused by a
modification of white light, as had been believed in the past. To each
coloured constituent, moreover, belonged an unvarying potentiality for
refraction; however large or small the angle of refraction, the blue rays
were always bent more than the red. The separate constituents could be
recombined to give white light identical with the first, but no ordinary
white light could be formed without all of them.
Like Hooke and Grimaldi — respectively the first to describe inter-
ference (as we now call it) and diffraction bands, both in 1 665 when Newton
was making his own early optical experiments — Newton discovered that
colours could be obtained from white light by other means than refrac-
tion. His studies of all these phenomena were profound; but his
mechanical hypotheses to account for the separation of the coloured
constituents were less successful, and unverifiable. His best effort was in
suggesting that when white light falls on an object, one or more of the
coloured constituents of the light may be more strongly reflected than the
rest, because of the corpuscular nature of the object’s surface. If for
instance green is reflected strongly and the rest weakly the object will
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appear green, and similarly with transmission through transparent
materials. 1 In the Principia Newton showed how a stream of particles
falling on a surface could be so bent round as to re-emerge, that is, be
reflected, the angles obeying the correct optical law. He always supposed
that refraction, interference and diffraction were caused by a force in or
near bodies acting upon the beam of light and bending it; 2 colours
appeared because the force acted more strongly on some constituents of
the beam than on others, and so caused them to diverge.
Newton was always — or very nearly always — careful to distinguish in
print between direct inference from experiment and explanatory hypo-
theses of light which had not been demonstrated. The lasting scientific
merit of his work lies in the former, though his hypotheses had a century-
long influence, and in them his constant recourse to concepts of corpus-
cular structure, and of attraction between the particles of bodies and those
of light, is perfectly clear. Once again physics was reduced, in principle,
to corpuscular dynamics, as in the theory of gravitation. Since the
exponents of the alternative pulse-theory shared similar notions of struc-
ture (though they did not admit Newton’s intracorpuscular forces of
attraction and repulsion) they were at a disadvantage: it was less easy to
connect a vibratory motion in the ether with the corpuscular structure of
reflecting and refracting bodies. Hooke’s ingenious hypothesis in the
Micrographia (1665), explaining how colours were produced by disturb-
ance of the pulses constituting white light, was invalidated by Newton’s
paper of 1672. Huygens worked out correctly the geometry of reflection
and refraction for the pulse-theory (Trait e de la Lumiere, 1690) but did
not attempt to explain the formation of colours. Though later theorists
were to build upon Huygens’s analysis, from the point of view of con-
temporary mechanical philosophers Newton’s hypotheses were more
readily acceptable, and explained far more. They seemed successful
because they satisfied current expectations of what a theory or hypothesis
in physics should do; expectations both too narrow in their range and too
ambitious in their pretensions that set the bounds of the scientific thought
of the age.
Discussion of fundamental theories and hypotheses was the subject of
only a small fraction of the scientific writing of the second half of the
seventeenth century. For the most part the physical sciences were treated
either mathematically or experimentally; Boyle was exceptional in his
explicit and detailed defence of the mechanical philosophy, and yet the
great bulk of even his work was devoted to the consideration of his
experiments. The publications of other physicists like Huygens, Newton,
Mariotte were also chiefly concerned with the reporting of experiments or
1 Newton showed that, when illuminated by a monochromatic light, objects (variously
coloured in white light) appear of the same colour, more or less brightly.
* Opticks, Quaery 5, etc.
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the development of propositions in mathematical form. On the other
hand, the expositors of Cartesian natural philosophy (as distinct from
mathematicians and experimenters who adopted Cartesian ideas where
they seemed useful) made scarcely any use of mathematical demonstra-
tion, and employed experiments only to illustrate their doctrines. After
initial resistance, attributable to partiality towards Aristotle combined
with a dislike of mechanism, the scientific principles of Descartes had
become fashionable. They were taught by the Jesuits, one of whom,
Jacques Rohault, wrote the outstanding textbook of Cartesian science,
which was popular until well into the next century ( Trait e de Physique,
1671). Adding little theoretically but something experimentally to
Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae (1644), Rohault expounded Cartesian
physics and cosmology plausibly, and with a greater air of certainty than
its originator. Cartesian physics was a system, whose metaphysical
postulates had been deliberately defined : hence in teaching it as a system
there was necessarily a considerable emphasis on its manner of explaining
phenomena universally by corpuscular mechanism. And as a system its
purpose was to explain the universe as a whole, not to describe or analyse
in detail particular phenomena (as Descartes himself had done in other
works). Even with this class of writing set aside, however, together with
the writings of those who clearly subscribed to Cartesian mechanism
though they cannot be numbered among its expositors, the mechanical
philosophy was undoubtedly dominant among physical scientists; as
Hooke wrote of his colleagues in the Royal Society, ‘they found some
reason to suspect that those effects of Bodies which have been commonly
attributed to [scholastic] Qualities, and those confessed to be occult, are
perform’d by the small machines of Nature’. The ‘small machines’, the
wheels within wheels of material bodies, were corpuscular mechanisms.
With common agreement on the basic idea and its application, and much
common language, analogy, and elementary illustration of the truth of the
mechanical philosophy, each scientist (again excepting the professed
Cartesians) produced his own variants in dealing with particular
phenomena — optics, chemical reaction, pneumatics, combustion, mag-
netism. Mechanical explanations were not fixed or determined.
The great originality of Newton was to lie in the suggestion that
various forces of attraction and repulsion — he did not define their nature
or number — operate between the component particles of bodies. ‘ Have
not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues, or Forces by
which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light . . . but also
upon one another for producing a great Part of the Phenomena of
Nature?’ he was to ask years later. This broad hypothesis was by no
means conspicuous when the Principia was published in 1687; on the
other hand, the notion of gravitational ‘attraction’ was itself enough to
disturb the strict mechanists, especially the Cartesians. That corpuscles
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and masses of matter should attract each other, and not be impelled
together by the pressure of a material ether, seemed to many a revival of
discredited occult forces. (Newton was careful later to insist that in
referring to ‘attractive’ and ‘repulsive’ forces he did not mean to deny
that these forces might be produced by mechanical impulses still
unknown.) Newton’s version of corpuscular mechanism, which had taken
definite shape at the time when the Principia was written though his ideas
were known to few, was more subtle and powerful than any that pre-
ceded it ; but the primitive billiard-ball simplicity of the earlier forms of
mechanical philosophy was sacrificed. However, the dispute between
Cartesians and Newtonians must be left for the present.
What should be said here is that the Principia, a book in which the
mechanical philosophy and the corpuscular structure of matter are
treated as common assumptions requiring no argument, provided the best
exemplification of mechanism. The universe of Newton is neither more nor
less mechanistic than that of Descartes. But Descartes had composed ‘un
beau roman de physique ’ (as Huygens said) : its machinery was imaginary.
The universe of the Principia is mathematically and observationally
impeccable ; 1 for the hypothetical machine-world of Descartes Newton
had substituted a testable and verified theory. The satellites of Jupiter and
Saturn, the revolutions of the planets, the motions of the moon and of the
tides, the oscillations of the pendulum, the descent of heavy bodies, the
flow of liquids, and the echo itself testify to its truth. And as Newton
reminded his readers more than once, what is true of the whole is true of
the parts : we can only deduce mathematically the laws governing observ-
able phenomena from our certainty that the invisible world of micro-
scopic particles is mechanistic, just as we confirm our certainty by the
experiments on macroscopic bodies which alone are feasible. In his con-
cept of force, as governing the motions of particles, Newton went far
beyond Descartes, preparing the way for the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century concept of field. He believed in the existence of many different
forces operative at the microscopic and the observable levels alike: three
(gravity, magnetism, and electricity) were directly demonstrable; others,
like the force by which bodies act on light, and that involved in chemical
reaction, could be inferred from experiments; others again, like the force
of cohesion rendering bodies hard, seemed necessary but even less sus-
ceptible to experiment. These forces would explain both why a world
made up of infinitesimal particles immensely thinly scattered in space was
nevertheless stable and solid, and why such a world was capable of
revealing motion, change, growth, and decay. Of all the forces only one,
gravity, was mastered by Newton ; only gravity was comprehended within
a mathematical system, with its laws and their operation securely proved
1 At least in principle! The Principia was not without error, as Newton’s critics pointed
out.
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from observation and experiment. Newton’s universe of particles and
forces was a mechanistic one, and he revealed the mechanism of gravita-
tion. This was the triumph of the mechanical philosophy; yet in com-
parison with Newton’s ambitions it was, perhaps, ‘ the shadow of a noble
experiment’. As he wrote in the preface to the Principia :
I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of Nature by the same kind of
reasoning from mechanical principles [as he had derived the phenomena of gravita-
tion] for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon
certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown,
are either mutually impelled towards one another, and cohere in regular figures, or
are repelled and recede from one another.
Many passages in Newton’s writings make it plain that, like other
followers of the mechanical philosophy and of Descartes, he saw the
intricacy of particulate structure as applicable, in increasing complexity of
explanation, to the understanding not merely of physics and chemistry
but of biological processes too. The quotation from Nehemiah Grew 1
shows that a naturalist need find nothing abhorrent in the physicist’s
picture of the universe. Perception and muscular control; nutrition and
growth; respiration and the motion of the heart; these and other charac-
teristic attributes of living beings were also regarded as explicable on
mechanical principles — though philosophers did so at the cost of main-
taining the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and matter . 2 The analogy
between physiological processes in the living being and chemical processes
in vitro had been emphasised earlier, by Paracelsus and van Helmont, for
example; if now chemistry was to be given a mechanistic theory, it was
natural that it should be extended to physiology. The progress of experi-
ment offered a very natural opportunity for this. Boyle’s experiments
with the air-pump, and other related ones, suggested a close similarity
between respiration and combustion in keeping with a much older simile
between life and flame. Animals and flame both needed air — or as it was
later proved, some constituent of the air; neither could survive in an
atmosphere vitiated by the other. Further, an animal rendered incapable
of normal breathing could be kept alive by filling its lungs with fresh air
from a bellows. It was consistent with anatomical knowledge to suppose
that it was the function of the lungs gradually to expose the whole blood
in the body to fresh air; and the clinching argument was supplied by
Lower’s demonstration that the change in appearance between venous
blood (entering the lungs) and arterial blood (leaving the lungs) was
effected by exposure of the former to air, and could be reproduced in vitro.
Hence, it was argued, something present in the air — some particles, of
course, usually qualified as nitrous — entered the blood and were necessary
1 See above, p. 57.
* Newton (for example) did not applaud the manner in which this distinction was upheld
by Descartes, but he did not challenge its basic necessity.
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to life, as they were to fire. These particles were purely hypothetical
entities, and no plausible role could be assigned to them in altering the
appearance of the blood or in physiology generally; but within the terms
of the mechanical philosophy the new theory gave a fresh significance to
Harvey’s discovery of the circulation, just as Malpighi’s actual observa-
tion of the passage of the blood through capillary vessels from the artery
to the vein completed its anatomical confirmation. The blood was not
only seen to move: its movement through the lungs and then about the
body had been given a purpose.
The study of respiration affords an example, somewhat rare in the
seventeenth century, of the fruitful transplantation of the ideas of physical
science into a biological environment. This transplantation is the core of
the work of the English physician John Mayow, published in 1668 and
1 674, who elaborated on the groundwork of Boyle, Hooke and Lower.
Mayow attempted a complete exploration of the physiological functioning
of the ‘nitro-aerial’ particles, which he regarded as also instrumental to
various phenomena in physics and chemistry; and in this the danger of
such transplantation becomes apparent, for it had the effect of slurring
over the distinction between a relatively simple effect in physics and a far
more complex one in biology. It was a long-standing weakness of
chemical theory and practice that chemists tended to regard an involved
organic operation — say the distillation of vegetable matter or of blood —
as though it were exactly like a simple inorganic process; it was even
worse to suppose that a plant ‘grew’ like a crystal, or that an animal
could be represented by a marionette of wheels and wires. The principle
was sound, but in reading Lower’s words (1669): ‘If you ask me for the
paths in the lungs, through which the nitrous spirit of the air reaches the
blood, and colours it more deeply, do you in turn show me the little pores
by which that other nitrous spirit, which exists in snow, passes into the
drinks of gourmets and cools their summer drinks . . . ’, one becomes aware
of the frailness of the shoot that was to be transplanted, and of the
dimness of the philosophers’ realisation of the change of environment
involved. Intellectually, the situation is not unlike that which existed in
actual fact when some experimenters (including Lower) attempted to trans-
plant an animal’s blood into man : if the experiments had worked better
their results would have been more often fatal.
Studies of other biological questions — of the ingestion and digestion of
food in men and animals, of the growth of plants from soil and water, or
forms of perception, especially vision, of the development of the mam-
malian foetus and so forth — either attempted the use for different purposes
of the new techniques of physical science, or sought to make better sense
of what was known in the light of physical ideas. None was very success-
ful, though one might note the future promise of such endeavours as
Nehemiah Grew’s to determine the composition of vegetable materials by
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chemical analysis. An enormously greater activity in biology, falling
into three wide categories, was directed less to the understanding of
function and growth than to enumeration and description.
There was first the continuing interest of medical men (for the most
part) in the structure of man and other species. Broadly speaking, the
general topographic anatomy of the human body had been fairly well
established by the mid-seventeenth century, and, apart from microscopic
investigation to be mentioned later, the emphasis was now on compara-
tive anatomy, or on more specialised and detailed examination of
particular organs or structures such as had been begun long before by
Fabricius and Casserio. A very large body of zoological knowledge was
built up by Claude Perrault (1613-88) and other members of the French
academy, who dissected mainly mammals and birds ; by Gerard Blasius
(c. 1625-92), who described in three books over a hundred species, and
others associated with him in Amsterdam; by the members of the
Academia Naturae Curiosorum, especially Johannes von Muralt of
Zurich (1645-1733); and in England by John Willis (1621-75; oyster,
lobster, earthworm) and Edward Tyson (1651-1708), the first English
zoological anatomist of real importance, who (besides others) dissected
three American species : the rattlesnake, peccary and opossum. His work
on the ‘ pygmy ’ (chimpanzee) showed that, if less than a man, it was not a
monkey. Technique advanced rapidly. Effective methods for injecting
specimens with wax and mercury were introduced by Jan Swammerdam;
anatomical museums came into existence, and of course illustration was
freely used. Some of the zoologists, like Swammerdam (and Hooke,
Lower and Wren in England) were led from dissection to experiment;
thus the contraction of the muscle of a frog on applying a mechanical
stimulus to the nerve provoked a good deal of curiosity. Descartes, who
had considerable experience as an anatomist, had attempted to account
for the transmission of a sensation from the external sense-organs to the
brain and of the ‘ message ’ from the brain to the muscles by the motions
of a subtle fluid; and Alphonso Borelli in De motu animalium (1 680-1)
attempted to develop a purely mechanistic approach even further. Yet
Swammerdam had already demonstrated that the volume of a muscle
does not increase on contraction ; rather, he thought, it diminished.
All this work on zoology did much to correct old errors and clear up
old problems, even though zoologists could still, despite the anatomical
evidence before their eyes, refuse to classify the porpoise and other
cetacea with the animals rather than the fishes. The swim-bladders of
fish were well understood, for instance, as was the insect eye; it was
possible to understand and compare the circulatory and reproductive
mechanisms in the different classes of mammals, amphibia, reptiles and
fishes, though many gaps were left and many mistakes made. Some
simple generalisations could be drawn, like that associating the type of
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stomach and the length of intestine with the food normal to the creature.
A very striking confutation of traditional zoological fallacy was provided
by Francesco Redi (a ^member of the Accademia del Cimento) in 1668.
It had long been believed, even the great Harvey having contradicted
himself on this point, that numerous creatures — frogs, bees, ‘barnacle
geese’, insects, and above all insect parasites — were spontaneously
generated from dirt and rottenness. Like summer flies, they appeared and
disappeared without trace. By simple observations and experiments (like
allowing meat to putrefy under muslin, so that flies were denied access to
it) as well as dissection, Redi proved that the supposedly spontaneously
generated creatures were reproduced by normal means. Putrescent matter
generated maggots only after flies had settled on it; the maggots in turn
became pupae from which hatched flies of the same kind. He asserted
roundly (and was joined in this by most naturalists of the later seventeenth
century, though the controversy was revived later in a new form) that all
kinds of plants and animals arise only from seeds or eggs produced by
parents of the same kind. Since it followed that the continuity of species
is preserved not by chance but by transmission, Redi effectively removed
the last obstacle to the acceptance of the concept of immutable specific
descent, like descending from like without significant variation.
From quite a different quarter came other support for the same con-
cept. The second category of biological description, that dependent on the
microscope, gave rise to ideas that seemed to establish the immutability of
species as almost a logical inevitability. After the early observations of
Stelluti (1618) the microscope resumed its role as the biologist’s indispen-
sable tool about 1660, in the hands (nearly at the same time) of Marcello
Malpighi, Robert Hooke, Jan Swammerdam, and Henry Power. The
first two used the compound microscope, optically and mechanically more
elaborate, but cumbersome, unstable and limited to a workable magnifica-
tion of about 60 or 80 times. The technical problems in making a really
efficient, high-power microscope were not solved before about 1830.
Swammerdam, like Leeuwenhoek later, used simple biconvex lenses, easy
to manipulate and capable of yielding an equal enlargement. Leeuwen-
hoek, an artist in making very small lenses and adapting them to his
purposes — he made over 400 microscopes for his own use, since he
adapted each one to a particular purpose — achieved magnifications of the
order of 300 by which he was able to see some bacteria. Even the less
powerful devices of Malpighi (1628-94) and Swammerdam (1637-80)
were enough virtually to bring new branches of biology into existence. The
former has the stronger claim to be considered the founder of animal and
plant histology ; together they created insect morphology in their studies of
the silkworm (Malpighi) and the may-fly (Swammerdam) through their
respective life-cycles. Malpighi’s description of the developing heart of
the chick has been described as ‘perhaps the most remarkable observa-
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tional achievement of any biologist in the seventeenth century’, 1 while
Swammerdam was undoubtedly its greatest entomologist. Both were
brought to the same ideas on generation: Malpighi by tracing back the
structure of the chick, Swammerdam by his discovery that at a certain
stage in the development of an insect the larval, pupal, and imaginal forms
may co-exist one within the other; they concluded that the embryo is
preformed in the egg. Its structure did not take shape, and change, as a
consequence of fertilisation and during growth; it merely swelled and
became visible. On this theory specific variation was impossible, because
the female parent had preformed its progeny independently of the male
and of any other circumstance; indeed, in the later variation of pre-
formation (emboftement) all eggs were held to have been created from the
beginning of the world, encapsulated one within the other until each
successive adult became mature.
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), the third of the great trio of
microscopists, was no less a preformationist. He claimed to have seen the
perfect form of a sheep in an embryo an eighth of the size of a pea; but
the discovery of spermatozoa (1677) convinced him that the male was the
true source of the preformed foetus : as he wrote to Grew, ‘If your Harvey
and our De Graaf 2 had seen the hundredth part they would have stated,
as I did, that it is exclusively the male semen that forms the foetus, and
that all the woman may contribute only serves to receive the semen and
feed it’. 3 No one ever saw a ‘ homunculus’ in the head of a sperm, though
pictures of it were published; yet Ovists and Animaculists debated for
over a century.
Leeuwenhoek is more justly remarkable in other respects. Untrained in
science and writing only in Dutch, he sent to the Royal Society and his
friends during a period of fifty years, beginning in 1672, about 300 letters,
many very extensive and mostly on his microscopic observations. In
microscopic anatomy he worked on mite, flea, lobster, louse, gnat and
aphis, though never demonstrating the mastery of Swammerdam. He
made elaborate comparative studies of spermatozoa. He discovered
parthenogenesis (in aphids). He examined the ‘globules’ of milk and
blood and the regular structure of plant matter — appearances which gave
ocular credibility to the corpuscular theory. Like other early micro-
scopists, he turned his gaze to almost anything that seemed a promising
subject, so that his letters seem to leap from one observation to the next
without order or coherence, though Leeuwenhoek was clearly capable of
more continuous and purposive observation than appears on the surface.
Thus, one day, applying his instrument to a drop of rainwater, he was
1 F. J. Cole, A History of Comparative Anatomy (London, 1949), p. 180.
• Discoverer of the uterine follicle, then misinterpreted as the mammalian egg (first seen
by von Baer in 1827).
* 18 March 1678: Collected Letters (Amsterdam, 1941), 11, 335.
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astonished to find it full of animalcula (protozoa), of which he described
numerous recognisable species; on another occasion, examining scrapings
from his teeth, he observed objects that were clearly bacteria, and of these
also he depicted several identifiable species obtained from various sources.
Impelled by a rich sense of curiosity, which he possessed the technique to
gratify, and a painstaking and percipient observer besides, Leeuwenhoek
is the founder of protozoology. His microscopes opened up a new world
of minute living things whose existence imagination had never suspected,
more strange than animals in the moon ; so strange indeed that many of his
reports met with incredulity at first, for only a few of his observations
(like those of ‘ vinegar-eels ’ — nematode worms) were easily repeatable with
other instruments, if at all.
As yet this new subcreation imposed no problems of taxonomy, though
it is possible to see occurring at once those problems arising from the lack
of a suitable descriptive terminology and a means of identification which
had long been familiar in the older natural history. This constitutes the
third category of biological description. By the middle of the seventeenth
century the problems of taxonomy created enormous difficulties here, for
knowledge was inadequate to devise a ‘ natural ’ classification (using many
specific characters), and no workable ‘artificial’ system (one based on a
few selected characters) had been devised. In the last of the traditional
herbals (an English example is Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum, 1640)
thousands of types of plants and their varieties were described; the
language of technical description was inadequate for its purpose, and
though the herbal might be conveniently enough arranged for pharma-
ceutical use, it was a poor botanical compendium, concealing the natural
affinities of species and the ‘plan’ of creation. The problem of classifica-
tion was especially acute in botany, but the case of mammals, reptiles,
fish, birds, and so forth was hardly better. Hence, in spite of all that had
been done by naturalists since the Renaissance, a great task of orderly
enumeration and description awaited their seventeenth-century suc-
cessors, freshly conditioned by the awakened interest of botanists in
plants for their own sake, and not as sources of drugs, and of zoologists
in animals as such, and not as imperfect models of the human frame. It
was possible for this task to be reduced to the narrower one of collecting
and cataloguing, as though these were the only functions of the naturalist;
but this happened less in the seventeenth century than in the eighteenth.
In particular, the outstanding naturalist of its latter half, John Ray
(1627-1705), is notable for the breadth of his discussions of taxonomical
principles, for his attention to ecology, and for his interest in comparative
anatomy and physiology. His scope was almost universal: besides his
vast work on plants and his incomplete entomology, he wrote (with
Francis Willughby) on birds and fishes as well. He was thus the last of the
great natural encyclopaedists, for he was neither a taxonomic specialist
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(like Linnaeus later, whose work tended to overshadow Ray’s), nor
a monographic writer like the contemporary zoologists. Although not
primarily a student of function, Ray sensibly adopted the discoveries of
others. Like Redi, he realised the absurdity of the common notion of
spontaneous generation ; like Grew, he believed in the sexuality of plants,
a question more fully cleared up by Camerarius (1694); and he was
absorbed into the controversy over the nature and purpose of the flow of
sap. Nor was he committed to any highly dogmatic view of the immut-
ability of specific forms ; on the contrary, like Hooke and, most impres-
sively, the Dane Niels Stensen (or Steno, 1638-86), he believed that fossils
were authentic organic remains. The argument for this latter view
inevitably rested upon the virtual indistinguishability of some of the
fossils — like Steno’s sharks’ teeth — from similar structures in extant
species, and so tended to diminish the problem of accounting for those
that were obviously dissimilar from extant species. But it was already
well known that the latter did occur and must represent creatures that
had lived only in the past, perhaps in some earlier creation.
Undoubtedly the quantity and quality of descriptive work in biology
will stand comparison with, if it does not in intrinsic complexity surpass,
anything that was done in the same period of a like kind in the physical
sciences. In biology, too, experiment was almost as necessary as observa-
tion, and in some respects the relationship between theory and facts,
though not mathematical, was hardly less intricate than in physics. But
if one might judge that physical science, in the universality of Newton’s
Principia and the mechanical philosophy, was tending to become a huge,
geometrised superstructure erected on a relatively slender basis of precise
ascertained fact, conversely biology tended to pile up its factual founda-
tions without creating a theoretical superstructure. Seventeenth-century
biologists were far less engaged in thinking than were physicists or (less
markedly) chemists; far more devoted to doing — collecting, dissecting,
drawing and making notes. And the texture of biological thinking, despite
the new strands woven into it, contained a multiplicity of threads that were
traditional, indefinite or derivative. Its concepts lacked the definition and
authority that those of the physical sciences were fast acquiring. To say
this is to indicate the difference between the two broad aspects of science,
and the different features of their historical evolution, not to regard one as
more progressive than the other. Seventeenth-century biologists did effect
a revolution in science ; but it was not of the same kind as the revolution
effected by the experimenters, mechanical philosophers, astronomers and
mathematicians. It did not bring about a vast and all-pervasive revolution
in thought; it did not alter the dimensions and quality of the stage on
which the players strut.
Hence, although a contemporary historian of seventeenth-century
science, such as William Wotton ( Reflections on Ancient and Modern
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Learning, 1694), might more often refer to its biological than to its
physical aspects, and though he might be more impressed by the dis-
coveries of Harvey and the accomplishments of Ray than those of Galileo
and Newton, it was the novelties of physical and mathematical science
that seized the attention of philosophers (as is still largely the case today).
It was the majesty of Newton’s achievement in setting out the funda-
mental mechanical laws of the universe that commanded the admiration
of Locke and Bentley, as it later provoked the criticisms of Leibniz and
Berkeley, and later still inspired Voltaire and the French philosophes. For
Locke, Newton devised a simpler proof than that published in the
Principia that dynamical reasoning entailed the elliptic orbit; for Bentley
he provided a detailed explanation of his idea of gravitation. Apart from
the more technical questions of philosophy raised by the Principia (such
as the problem of induction, expressly discussed by Newton in more than
one passage, and that of the relation between mathematical reasoning and
physical reality), it impelled the reader to inquire into the role of God in
the mechanistic universe that Newton had depicted: a question that
Descartes had similarly aroused in the minds of his readers. The devoutly
religious Newton was far from believing that God had abandoned His
creation when it was complete; rather he opened himself to the criticism
of Leibniz that, for Newton, God was an imperfect workman who had
constantly to tinker with His machine in order to keep it running. So, it
seemed, either God’s intervention in the creation is needless, or else He
has made it less perfect than He might. This was an irresolvable antithesis
that philosophers might debate as long as they chose, but for physics the
practical answer was that God had been driven from the universe with
the planetary intelligences. However impious Laplace’s legendary quip
might sound, it no more than stated an accepted position. In biology it
was otherwise as yet: no one could divorce the concepts of life and
intelligence from that of divinity. There, this more complicated and
emotional debate was postponed to a still remote future.
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CHAPTER IV
PHILOSOPHY
I n the history of philosophy the seventeenth century is associated with
the names of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Locke. The
doctrines of these philosophers mark a momentous turning-point in
European thought: they were developed in close interrelation with the
contemporary ‘scientific revolution’; 1 they introduced new basic con-
cepts and methods of knowledge ; they also had a profound effect upon the
course of modem philosophy as a whole.
The process which led to the Cartesian interpretation of the world had
two main aspects. In the first place, the conception of nature as an
organism, characteristic of the early phase of Renaissance thought, gave
way to the view that all phenomena are to be conceived on the analogy
of the movements of a machine. Accordingly, on this view, causes were
antecedent motions and, as such, efficient causes : all physical change was
explained as the effect of the motions and impacts of matter in space and
time. In proportion as the mechanistic view prevailed, the appeal of the
traditional doctrine of final causes, namely the doctrine that processes in
nature are directed by a tendency to attain a specific end, diminished.
The new method of explanation was also attractive because it seemed
particularly successful. It enabled a scientist not only to interpret but, in
Francis Bacon’s phrase, 2 to dominate nature. The underlying assumption
was that, if it is known how phenomena are generated, it is possible to
predict them on any particular occasion and in this sense to gain power
over nature.
Secondly, with motion accepted as the principle of all natural pro-
cesses, it became clear, particularly to Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo
(1564-1642), that the structure of reality was fundamentally quantitative
and not, as for Aristotle, reducible to qualitative distinctions; that there-
fore the appropriate method of scientific explanation was to formulate
the laws of motion with the help of mathematics. Much that is character-
istic of mathematics naturally enhanced its prestige in the past: its terms
are easily intelligible and its definitions precise; its propositions are inter-
connected and its proofs conclusive. On no other basis did it seem
possible to render the formulation of truths both necessary and universal.
For this reason, and because of its success in the solution of scientific
problems during the seventeenth century, the mathematical method was
applied to other fields of study such as ethics, political theory, jurispru-
1 For this, see ch. m, above.
2 Novum Organum (1620), Bk. i, Aph. in.
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dence, and theology. It was regarded as above all the model for philo-
sophical reasoning. The rationalist philosophy of the day, at any rate,
consisted in an eagerness for clear intellectual intuitions and tight deduc-
tive systems. What was furthermore expected of philosophers was that
they should settle conclusively, that is, by a priori argument, particular
matters of fact as well as questions concerning the ultimate nature of
reality as a whole. The differences in kind between a philosophical and a
scientific problem had thus not yet become apparent. Often also, as is
shown by the wide range and variety of their correspondence, philosophers
were either polymaths like Leibniz, or at least conversant with many
branches of knowledge, like Hobbes. The general tendency, however, was
to accumulate knowledge not for its own sake as in the Renaissance, when
wisdom had often been identified with learning, but in order to unify it
and to arrive at a judgement that recommended itself to reason and the
methods of geometrical demonstration.
Philosophy then was universal in yet another sense. It permeated the
whole of society, including the salons of educated women. Its chief tool
was alleged to be good sense, 1 or the ‘natural light’ of reason, and this
could be presumed to exist in every ordinary person alike. The truths of
philosophy should therefore be generally intelligible and acceptable every-
where without question. Moreover, as the greatest philosopher of the
time, the Frenchman Rene Descartes (1596-1650), had shown in the
Discours de la Methode (1637), it was possible for a philosophical book to
be written in the vernacular and to be lucid as well as forceful. His own
philosophy reigned supreme, not only in France and in Holland, where he
had lived for many years and had written all his important works, but
also, after his death at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden, in other
countries. None the less, the authority of Cartesianism was by no means
unlimited : it was at all times and everywhere faced with powerful criticism
and opposition. This was the ‘century of genius’, 2 glorying in a great
number of eminent thinkers. Even such a close friend and admirer of
Descartes as Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate (1618-80), 3 to whom he
dedicated his Principles of Philosophy (1644), admitted that she found
several of his doctrines both strange and difficult. Besides, the Cartesian
philosophy had itself been instrumental in undermining respect for
orthodoxy and fostering the spirit of critical discussion, and it is signifi-
cant from this point of view that the first edition of Descartes’s Meditations
(1641) included six sets of Objections written in criticism of this work,
together with his Replies. Among those who contributed to the Objections
were Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi. Indeed, those most critical of
1 Descartes, Discourse on Method, Pt. 1, ab init.; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, ab init.
* For the phrase see A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge, 1926),
ch. hi.
3 A daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and a granddaughter of King James I.
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Descartes were the founders of modem empiricism. They too were
inspired by the new developments in science. But they believed that all
knowledge was based ultimately not on a priori and deductive arguments,
but on sensory evidence and generalisations from experience. The
empiricist approach, accordingly, though by no means anti-mathematical,
proved hostile to the metaphysical and speculative ambitions character-
istic of Cartesianism.
There was more than one reason for the central position of the Cartesian
philosophy in the seventeenth, century. In the first place, unlike the
old-style philosophy of the Renaissance, it was systematic and technically
adequate. Descartes was himself a mathematician of genius; and by his
invention of analytical or co-ordinate geometry he promoted the mechan-
istic description of nature in terms of extension, figure and motion.
Secondly, he thought that knowledge of the external world depends not so
much on what is known as on self-knowledge and the capacity to know.
Two assumptions led him to this belief: first, that he could deduce his
own existence solely from the fact that he was thinking; secondly, that
what he immediately experienced was necessarily mental so that it was
impossible to experience physical objects independently of ideas. His
teaching that knowledge of the real is relative to the mind gave rise, on
the one hand, to idealism and phenomenalism — the tendency to merge
the objects of knowledge with ideas — and, on the other, to psychologism
in philosophy — the claim to solve the problem of knowledge by means of
introspecting mental states and operations. By initiating a preference for
the ‘how’ over the ‘what’ of knowledge, for epistemology over ontology,
Descartes was responsible for the modern ‘bifurcation’ of knowledge.
His starting-point was an attitude of scepticism which, however, he
used as a weapon with which to fight the sceptics on their own ground.
Even the most general doubt, he argued, implies thinking and this in turn
the existence of whoever thinks : cogito ergo sum. The great merit of his
methodological doubt was that it acted as a filter: it separated what one
has a right to believe from what prejudice or authority make one believe.
And indeed to say ‘I am thinking’ as also to say ‘I exist’ is to say what is
in some sense indubitable : to doubt or to deny either precisely proves it
to be true. Modem existentialists, on the other hand, have paid tribute to
Descartes because he began from an existential premise, a factual truth . 1
If his starting-point was a fact, however, it was not logically necessary,
and if it was a truth of reason it was not sufficiently informative.
Descartes’s predicament was that his system lacked the foundation which
he thought he had provided.
In order to give his system the necessary additional support Descartes
set himself to prove the existence of an omnipotent and veracious God.
He employed three arguments, of which one was the so-called ontological
1 K. Jaspers, Descartes und die Philosophic (Berlin, 1937), pp. 15, 30.
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proof made famous by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century.
The argument from design, also called the physico-theological argument,
found no favour with Descartes : it involves the concept of final causes,
which he excluded from his mechanistic explanation of nature. All
traditional arguments have been declared invalid, especially the onto-
logical one, which rests on the assumption (refuted by Hume and Kant)
that existence is a predicate. Nevertheless it would be difficult to point to
any seventeenth-century philosopher in whose system God was not a
necessary postulate. A mechanic was required for Newton’s physics, and
even such a materialist as Hobbes accepted, though reticently, the idea of
God as a first cause and a supreme legislator.
The advantage of allying theology to philosophy was that problems
arising in either field could be solved more easily. But there were also a
number of specific reasons why the concept of God, even if it retained
little of its traditional meaning, remained of fundamental importance in
seventeenth-century, and particularly in Descartes’s, philosophy. One
was the general interest in substance. Descartes defined substance as that
which, like God, can exist of itself, or which needs only the concurrence of
God in order to exist. Then there were the epistemological difficulties
created by the two-substance doctrine of mind and matter, which, accord-
ing to Descartes’s disciple John Clauberg (1622-65), justified an appeal to
divine intervention. If, as for Descartes, the world of mind and that of
matter are fundamentally distinct substances, knowledge cannot be the
effect of contact or interaction between the two : it must be the result of an
innate disposition on the part of the human mind, founded ultimately
upon the arbitrary, inscrutable will of God.
By arguing from the necessity that every event has a cause Descartes
believed he could show that material things exist independently of our
minds, that they are atomic in structure, and that their essential pro-
perties are extension and its modes, namely shape, size, position, and
motion. In common with Galileo and indeed with most contemporary
thinkers, empiricists as well as rationalists, he held that these so-called
primary qualities, being quantitative characteristics, are susceptible of
mathematical treatment and therefore the only proper objects of scientific
understanding. On the other hand, neither he nor the other thinkers
believed that such sensible qualities as colour, sound, or taste could
represent the real character of material things, since in their view this
consists of nothing but atoms in motion. Descartes’s approach was
particularly radical in that for him all sense perception, including that of
the primary qualities, if taken as an indication of what things are in them-
selves, is at least partially illusory and of only biological use. Though he
occasionally stressed the value and necessity of experience in physics, his
tendency was to maintain that we know the true nature of the real by
a priori intuition and deductive inference alone.
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PHILOSOPHY
The main feature of Descartes’s physics, his equation of matter with
extension, was particularly important. In the first place, this doctrine
proclaimed, as against Aristotle, that there is one uniform substance
spreading everywhere and common to every material thing, celestial as
well as terrestrial. Secondly, it implied that since the world is homo-
geneous and infini te it can have no centre or fixed points. Descartes’s
achievement was to provide this view with a consistent scientific formula-
tion, as is best shown by his theory of motion. Since in an infinite, homo-
geneous space no place has an absolute meaning, he thought that move-
ment could not be conceived as locomotion in the strict sense, that is as
the activity of a body wandering from one place to another, but only as
transference of a body from one vicinity to another. By milking motion
consist in a geometrical change Descartes proved it to be relative: he
could show that there is as much motion in bodies leaving their surround-
ings as in the surroundings themselves. With this idea of the reciprocity of
motion Descartes formulated a principle which Newton recognised only
in a limited sense, restricting it as he did to unaccelerated motion, and
which it was left for Einstein to demonstrate.
There was, in the seventeenth century generally, a growing interest in
problems of relativity, arising partly as a result of the implications of
travellers’ tales, partly in connection with the spread of sceptical ideas.
Hobbes expressed it in his remark that a constant impression is the same
as no impression; Leibniz in his belief that the universe is a system of
perspectives; Pascal and Malebranche in speculations centred on the
notion that ‘nothing is in itself either great or small’. The idea had
appealed to Shakespeare, who found that time ‘travels in divers paces
with divers persons V and it was to be furnished with a general illustration
in Dean Swift’s ‘elementary treatise on relativity’, 2 Gulliver's Travels
(1726).
Many parts of Descartes’s physical theory, particularly those described
by his first biographer, the abbe Baillet, as his ‘romance of nature’, soon
became obsolete. One of these was his theory of vortices, an explanation
of the origin and constitution of the universe in accordance with mechan-
istic principles. Another was his cumbersome explanation of the inter-
action between soul and body and of their union in the pineal gland, and
his assertion that animals are mere automata. A further stumbling-block
was his equation of matter with extension, which gave rise to difficulties
concerning the doctrine of the Eucharist and that of Creation.
As a result, charges of atheism were brought against Descartes, and in
1663 his works were placed on the Roman Index of forbidden books,
where they have remained ever since. Hence also Blaise Pascal (1623-62),
1 As You Like It, in, ii, 326.
’ For the phrase see A. S. Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation (Cambridge, 1920),
P- 32 .
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in his Perishes (1670), complained: ‘I cannot forgive Descartes: he would
have liked, throughout the whole of his philosophy, to be able to do
without God.’ 1 To Descartes’s mechanistic view and his axiom of the
supremacy of reason Pascal, in an almost modem ‘existentialist’ fashion,
opposed the ‘reasons of the heart’ and the ‘truths of fact’. Though
brought up a Cartesian and an eminent mathematician himself, he firmly
believed that the scientific approach could never yield certainty in its own
right. He was particularly haunted by the two ‘abysses’ of the infinitely
small and the infinitely great, and since the ambitions of the intellect
proved to him self-defeating he became sceptical and derisive of philo-
sophy and, instead, a staunch believer in the revealed mysteries of faith.
It fell to Descartes’s chief disciple, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715),
to make Cartesianism appear more palatable to the ecclesiastical
authorities. He achieved this by combining the teaching of Descartes
with doctrines of St Augustine and the Neo-Platonists. Following Louis
de la Forge and Geraud de Cordemoy, two older disciples of Descartes,
he stressed the importance of the Cartesian theory that everything
requires divine support in order to continue in existence; and hence he
inferred that God is the sole real cause and force in the world. From this
he was able to derive two further doctrines. The first, the theory of
occasionalism, explained the apparent interaction of mind and body as
the result of divine intervention: God moves my body each time I decide
to move it, and similarly He produces an experience in my mind on the
occasion of a change in my body. The theory became common property
among Cartesians, though it was Arnold Geulincx (1625-69) of Antwerp
who, in his Ethics (1665), first elaborated it into a system. There were two
versions of occasionalism. The argument was either that God interfered
directly on each particular occasion, or that His intervention happened
indirectly and once for all at the moment of creation. Malebranche
eventually adopted the second version, which came very near Leibniz’s
theory of pre-established harmony.
In close dependence on occasionalism Malebranche developed his
second principal doctrine, that of seeing all things in God. This was based
on three assumptions: (1) that all we know is ideas; (2) that those of
sense are false; (3) that since there cannot be in each mind an infinite
number of innate ideas, knowledge must consist in a divine illumination
of the intellect. The Platonic and idealist epistemology of Malebranche’s
main work, the Recherche de la Verite (1674-5), and the acute criticism of
it in Antoine Amauld’s (1612-94) Traits des Vraies et des Fausses I dees
(1683) gave rise to a bitter controversy, one of the most famous of the
time. Not long afterwards a similar polemic developed in England
between John Locke, a critic of the Recherche, and John Norris (1667 -
17 1 1), a prominent disciple of Malebranche.
1 Pensies, fr. 77 (ed. Branschvicg).
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The influence of Malebranche was indeed considerable. He supplied
the premises of Pierre Bayle’s (1647-1706) scepticism as well as for Bishop
Berkeley’s conclusion that things are ultimately ideas in the mind of God.
He also provided a stimulus for David Hume’s (1711-76) phenomenalism
and his denial of necessary connections in experience. But though
Malebranche was himself a student, nay the founder, of empirical
psychology, being like Francis Bacon particularly interested in the causes
of human error, he was ultimately a metaphysician, without the common-
sense approach and the analytical methods characteristic of British
empiricists. Undoubtedly he was the most original, and certainly the
acknowledged leader, of Descartes’s followers, most of whom were
regarded by Leibniz as mere commentators. 1 Yet none of the varieties of
Cartesianism was capable of holding its own against the rival systems of
Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton and Locke. Particularly inauspicious was the
tendency, apparent in Geulincx’s Metaphysics (1691) and the Essay upon
Reason (1694) of his disciple Richard Burthogge, to undermine Descartes’s
basic realism by unfolding the idealistic implications in his thought. The
only really persistent influence of the Cartesian system lay in its method,
which was everywhere adopted by educated men in Western Europe.
The main principles of this method found their way into the most influen-
tial textbook of Cartesianism, the Port-Royal Logic or L’art de penser
(1662), edited by the Jansenists Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole
(1625-95).*
Some, but not all, of the difficulties inherent in the Cartesian philosophy
were overcome by Baruch, or Benedict, de Spinoza (1632-77), a Jew
whose family, originally from Portugal, had settled in Holland. He owed
his main inspiration to Descartes, but he was also indebted to Neo-
Platonism, Renaissance philosophers like Giordano Bruno, and of course
Hebrew traditions. His main work, the Ethics (1677), published after his
premature death at the age of forty-four, presents difficulties to the
uninitiated and is indeed in several respects like a sacred text. But there
are many who have found relish in its breadth of vision, the substance of
its thought, and the power and subtlety of its moral teaching. A particular
characteristic of the work is its geometrical presentation in terms of
definitions, axioms, proofs, and corollaries. Spinoza’s aim to secure
scientific objectivity was furthered also by ‘ regarding human actions and
emotions just as if he were dealing with lines, planes, or bodies’. 3
His first step was to show that there can be only one substance, God,
and that this is necessarily infinite, for if there were two they would limit
one another and neither could then claim to be, like a true substance,
1 Letter to Malebranche, 22 June 1679, in Samtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Preussische
Akademie der Wissenschaften (Darmstadt, 1926), series n, 1, 473.
1 For Port-Royal and Jansenism, see below, ch. vi, pp. 132-6.
* Ethics , Pt. hi, Preface; Tractatus Politicus, ch. i, para. 4.
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self-explanatory. A most unorthodox doctrine followed from this, namely
that there could be no creation on the part of God since such an act would
involve the distinction between God and nature, that is, two substances.
This application of logic to theology, as also Spinoza’s critical exegesis of
the Bible in his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), which revealed
Christianity as a historical phenomenon, struck at the roots of traditional
dogma. As he explained nature mechanistically and rejected all anthropo-
morphic views of God and freedom of will in man, he came to be decried
as an atheist, even by a Cartesian such as Malebranche and a sceptic such
as Bayle. No doubt he was often insufficiently understood, and Novalis’s
appraisal of him as the ‘ God-intoxicated man V though itself not wholly
unbiased, was probably more correct. Spinoza himself regarded his
heterodoxy as an expression of intellectual independence, which he prized
so much that in 1673 he declined the offer of a chair of philosophy at
Heidelberg, which he feared would impose on his teaching the necessity
of becoming officially respectable. Though an outcast from both the
Christian and Jewish communities he was a happy and tolerant man. He
earned his livelihood as a lens-grinder, true to his maxim that a free man
who lives among ignorant people should try to do without their charity.
All the remaining features of Spinoza’s philosophy can be deduced
from his notion of substance. Obsessed as he was with the idea that sub-
stance must be absolutely infinite, he argued that it is not infinite in one
respect only, for example, in space, but must have an infinite number of
attributes. In his view, only two of these are known to the human
intellect: extension and thought. That is to say, whatever is spiritual in
the universe is at the same time part of extension and, conversely, what-
ever occurs as a physical event also occurs as a mental event. The problem
of how soul and body can be said to interact causally thus did not arise
for Spinoza. For him mind and matter were inseparably correlated aspects
of one and the same state of affairs in the one substance. A strange
implication of this view was that in Spinoza’s opinion we perceive a
physical object only in so far as our body is affected by it so that the
perception is really of a change in our body. A further implication was
that the order of extended things or of material changes is the same as the
order in which ideas follow one another in God’s mind or in the minds of
men. This led Spinoza to hold that all connections in the world can be
discovered by a priori reasoning alone, without the least help from
observation. He thereby obliterated the distinction between the factual
relation of cause and effect and the logical relation of ground and con-
sequence. It was the price — a costly one, as Hume and Kant would have
thought — he paid for his solution of the problem of the relation between
mind and matter.
Spinoza’s ethics is deducible directly from his metaphysical principles.
1 Fragmente, ed. Kamnitzer (Dresden, 1929), fr. 1730.
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Like the ancient Stoics, whose doctrines had been revived by Michel de
Montaigne (1533-92), Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), and William Du Vair
(1556-1621), he would hold that in order to know the nature and goal of
man it was indispensable to know his place in the universe. He believed
that to the extent that finite beings are acted upon by their environment
they experience emotions which upset their internal balance. The prob-
lem, as he envisaged it, was how to evade this ‘human bondage’. He
solved it through his theory of conatus. Like Hobbes and Leibniz he
thought that it is of the essence of every individual thing to endeavour to
preserve its own being. In the case of men and their comparatively
developed thinking power, this tendency is expressed by a desire to
counteract their dependence on external causes, which makes them slaves
of passion, by behaviour which is active and which springs from their own
nature. This is the case whenever we think logically or, in Spinoza’s
terms, form ‘adequate’ ideas of ourselves, our environment, and our
relation to God. Man’s freedom and happiness therefore, Spinoza
argued, increase with the number of adequate ideas in his mind.
Two important qualifications have to be borne in mind. First, a man is
free, on Spinoza’s view, not in the sense that his behaviour is undeter-
mined, but in the sense that it is unconstrained, that is, undetermined by
external factors. Secondly, though he believed that a man is free only if
his behaviour is dictated by his reason, he was too much a man of the
Renaissance 1 not to appreciate the delightful and useful emotions. More-
over, he challenged the intellectualist thesis of the Stoics that it is within
the power of reason to expel an emotion. His psychological insight made
him realise that a passion can be checked or replaced only by another and
stronger passion. This doctrine carried a message of great educational
importance : vice is to be avoided not by fighting against it, but by arousing
the active emotions of love and pleasure. Similarly, knowledge, Spinoza
thought, must appear as intellectual love, amor intellectualis Dei.
One of the most convincing of his recommendations for moral progress
and individual happiness was that we can make an obsessive passive
emotion harmless by forming a clear and distinct idea of it. The most
important part of his ethical theory, however, was that everything must
be viewed in the light of its necessary relation to the whole order of
nature, that is ‘under a certain form of eternity’. 2 Morality, he con-
sidered, was concerned with the truth of scientific laws, undistorted by
praise and blame or the myopia inherent in subjective points of view. By
eliminating from the moral sphere all authority, dogma, reward and
punishment he made ethics in this sense autonomous. On the other hand,
there was no room in his thought for the concept of duty; besides, his
monistic conception of substance blurred the ordinary distinctions
1 Ethics , Pt. iv, prop. 45, note ii.
* Sub quadam aeternitatis specie: Ethics , Pt. 11, prop. 44, coroll. ii.
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between ethics, physics and logic. It was chiefly this unitary and all-
comprehensive character of his system which earned him the label of a
pantheist. It also caused his fame among the English romantics and the
German idealists at the end of the eighteenth century.
Spinoza had much in common with the German philosopher Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), but there was also a marked contrast
between the two philosophers, noticeable in the manner of their lives.
While Spinoza was a solitary and almost saintly man, intent on one single
purpose, Leibniz was a courtier and a diplomat, whose energies were
dispersed in worldly plans and official commitments as well as in an
extraordinary variety of intellectual pursuits. Similarly, as philosophers,
they differed in their dominating vision. Unlike Spinoza, Leibniz did not
start with one all-inclusive category, the divine substance, but with many
individual substances, which he called monads and which explain the title
of one of his chief works, the Monadology (1720). All substances, he
believed, are spiritual and what seems to be matter, motion, and extension
is really mind. Though in his early years he considered himself a follower
of Gassendi and Hobbes, he abandoned their mechanistic systems during
his sojourn in Paris (1672-6), which was one of the most stimulating
events in his life. He found the notion of atoms on which these systems
were based particularly unsatisfactory. A true substance, he argued, must
be a unitary thing and therefore unextended, indivisible, and organic; it
must be an immaterial centre of energy, immune from external influences.
Leibniz arrived at his conception of a multitude of individual substances
chiefly as a result of two mistaken assumptions. The first was that all
statements can be properly expressed in the subject-predicate form. The
second was that the predicate of any true affirmative statement is included
in the concept of the subject, so that all true statements become analytic.
The two beliefs in conjunction explain Leibniz’s conviction that the con-
cept of an individual substance virtually contains, once for all, everything
that can ever happen to it. He broached the question for the first time in
his Discourse on Metaphysics (1685-6), but this important work was not
published until 1846. However, a summary was sent to Amauld, who in
the famous correspondence that ensued (1686-90) objected to its main
doctrines because he thought they entailed the denial of all liberty to man
and to God.
But Leibniz’s metaphysics was not exclusively built upon his logic. 1
Monadism was attractive in that it represented an open and dynamic
system instead of the closed and static one of Spinoza. God’s omni-
potence, Leibniz came to think, was most conspicuously revealed in a
world of the widest variety and composed of the maximum number of
1 Though this is the principal thesis of the pioneer works by B. Russell, A Critical
Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (London, 1900), and L. Couturat, La Logique de
Leibniz d'apres documents inddits (Paris, 1901).
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substances. He and many of his contemporaries were obsessed by the
notion of the infinite. In mathematics this led him, independently of
Newton, to the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus (1676). In meta-
physics it made him postulate, within each monad, myriads of mental
states, conscious and subconscious, representing a miniature universe
which only an infinitely prolonged analysis could fully reveal. No wonder
he was excited over the new microscopical discoveries of cells and
spermatozoa, for he was himself trying to explain what it must be like
inside an indivisible organism. The characteristics of substances, accord-
ing to him, were perceptions following one another continuously by the
action of some internal principle which he called ‘ appetition ’.
Leibniz made much of the law of continuity according to which there
are no leaps in nature, and this was to play an important part in modem
science. However, on his view it applied to developments within monads
only, not to anything external to them. A monad, he in fact asserted, can
neither act nor be acted on by anything outside itself. Each is ‘window-
less’, that is, living in complete isolation from any other. He was con-
vinced that this self-sufficiency of substances was a guarantee of the soul’s
liberty as well as of its immortality, and that this gave his philosophy a
great advantage over its mechanistic rivals. Such an advantage, however,
was accompanied by a great disadvantage. The rigid Cartesian dichotomy
between thought and extension reappeared in the gulf between any two
monads.
The difficulty for Leibniz was to explain how on his premises a tree, for
instance, which is an island colony of monads, can be perceived by a mind,
which is another such island colony, and similarly how a man can move
his arm or kick a ball. The solution of the problem — the great philo-
sophical problem of the age — was provided by his famous doctrine of
pre-established harmony. His view was that for every one of the infinitely
many perceptions or internal states arising spontaneously within a monad
at any given time there invariably happens to be a corresponding per-
ception or state in every other monad; what appears as interaction
between mind and matter and between soul and body is in reality the
result of a gigantic miracle of adaptation or synchronisation between
developments of mutually independent souls. Hence Leibniz came to
speak of monads as ‘mirroring’ the universe each from its own point of
view.
The reason why, for Leibniz, perspectives must differ from one another
was his ‘principle of sufficient reason’, from which he deduced most of
his physics and natural theology. The principle stipulated that there is
always a sufficient reason why a thing should be as it is, the course of its
development being completely determined by a rule arising from God’s
choice of what is best. As Leibniz wished his fatalism to leave room for
free will, he argued that sufficient reasons ‘incline without necessitating’.
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Few, it seems, were convinced by this argument, and Voltaire spoke
derisively of Leibniz’s raison insuffisante } Another famous principle
advanced by Leibniz was that of the identity of indiscemibles (or of the
dissimilarity of the diverse). This had occupied his mind ever since his
doctor’s dissertation of 1663, the De principio individui. In a philosophy
like his it must indeed be a necessary truth that if things are two they are
discernible, while if they are indiscernible they are not really two but one.
For the only way in which it is possible, on his premises, to refer to a
substance uniquely is in terms of attributes which it does not have in
common with other substances. Among attributes Leibniz included
circumstances of time and place. He regarded these as a kind of order
among phenomena and as purely perceptual. As a result of this view he
became involved, at the end of his life, in the celebrated and, on his part,
brilliant correspondence with Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), who defended
Newton’s theory that space and time are real entities, that is, existing in
their own right and not ideally in thinking substances. This theory, in the
eyes of Leibniz, was pure fiction, and though plausible to the ordinary
man, science has in fact discredited it.
Leibniz took a decisive step forward in the ideal of science as a unified
encyclopaedia, beyond the artificial symbolisms of Raymond Lully
(1235-1315) and his own contemporaries Athanasius Kircher, George
Dalgarno and John Wilkins. His aim was to construct not so much a
universal language as a system of rules by means of which the connections
between the several parts of knowledge become self-explanatory and all
reasoning is reduced to calculation. In his youthful thesis De arte
combinatoria (1666) and subsequent papers he elaborated a logical
calculus, a ‘universal characteristic’, which included shrewd methods of
estimating probabilities. His symbolic logic became the forerunner of
modem logistic, though its fruits were either forgotten or remained
unpublished until almost two hundred years after his death, by which
time they had been worked out independently by subsequent logicians.
The major defect of Leibniz’s logic was his failure to take into account the
independent nature of relations, which he believed were reducible to
predicates. This is the more astonishing as his analysis of mathematical
reasoning should have made him aware of the mistake. Besides, he knew
and admired the Logica Hamburgensis (1638) of Joachim Jung, the first
to inquire into the logic of relations and non-syllogistic forms of inference,
which was perfected two hundred years later by Boole, Frege, Peirce and
Russell. Another difficulty was Leibniz’s claim that his calculus could be
usefully applied to domains other than mathematics and, indeed, to all
branches of knowledge. The claim is unjustifiable, since abstract calculi
operate only within deductive systems, that is, those starting from a few
1 Correspondance, letter to Mairan of 5 May 1741, ed. Besterman (Geneva, 1955),
xi, 108.
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precisely definable concepts. They can never exhibit the full range and
flexibility of meaning characteristic of general empirical discourse, nor
the different kinds of implication that form part of it.
The reason for Leibniz’s claim was his belief in a harmonious and
inherently rational universe. On his view, therefore, the boundaries
between different spheres of thought should not only be passed over but
effaced. In his Systema Theologicum (1686), accordingly, he worked out a
universal rational theology on which to base the reunion of the Christian
Churches, for the conflict between them had certainly not been resolved
by the Peace of Westphalia. With his many-mansioned mind he was
doubtless the last truly universal man and hence also the first to see future
scientific advance as the work not of individual geniuses but of co-opera-
tive enterprise. And just as his vast correspondence animated the whole
contemporary republic of letters in Europe, irrespective of wars and
religious differences, so was he the moving spirit behind schemes for the
foundation of academies in Germany, Austria and Russia. Furthermore,
throughout his life he encouraged Jesuit missionaries in China to work for
a cultural union between Europe and the East. But though his own
system was extraordinarily comprehensive, it was too much of an attempt
to reconcile opposites — such as mechanism and purposive explanation,
or contingency and necessity — to be convincing. There was no less of the
miraculous in his world than in that of the Cartesians, even though the
miracles filling his universe were, on his interpretation, miracles of reason.
His most emphatic conclusion was that God had created the best, at
least the most perfectible, of all possible worlds. He expressed this
optimism in his Essais de Theodicee (1710), a critique of Pierre Bayle the
sceptic. Four years after the Lisbon earthquake Voltaire, in his Candide
(1759), ridiculed it in the person of Doctor Pangloss, though in his Siecle
de Louis XIV (1751) he fully recognised Leibniz’s outstanding significance.
On account of its popular exposition the Theodicee, together with Bayle’s
Dictionary, became one of the most influential books of the eighteenth
century. In this way it contributed to the decline of the hegemony of
Cartesianism in European intellectual life. At the same time its monadism
provided a metaphysical prop for the Protestant dogma of direct com-
munication between God and each individual believer. 1
Under the influence of Christian Wolff (1679-1754), professor of
mathematics at Halle, Leibniz’s doctrine was narrowed into a school
philosophy on which Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was brought up. The
latter took over from Leibniz the criticism of Locke’s empiricism and the
doctrine of the a priori character of the notions of the intellect. Leibniz
likewise stimulated the romantic reaction by his views of individuality and
development; however, these have ceased to satisfy because of their con-
nection with the traditional belief in substance and the subject-predicate
1 Monadology, paras. 83 (T.
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logic. The use he made of the notion of perspectives, on the other hand,
has had a striking effect on modem theories, especially those of Whitehead
and Russell.
One of Leibniz’s) major works, the Nouveaux Essais sur I'entendement
humain (written in 1703 and published posthumously in 1765), was an
answer to John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690).
It expresses, more conspicuously than any other, the issues involved in the
controversy between the metaphysical rationalists of the time and the
contemporary school of empiricism. During the seventeenth century the
latter had established itself as a leading tradition and had even begun to
challenge the supremacy of Cartesianism. The principal reason for rivalry
between the two schools was that each favoured and, in its own way,
owed much to the contemporary scientific movement. An additional
reason was that they formed different geographical associations : ration-
alism with the Continent and empiricism with England. The new scientific
outlook obtained a particularly prominent expression in the London
Royal Society (founded in 1660), which took its stand squarely on the
philosophy of Francis Bacon. The achievements of British empirical
science, especially those of Isaac Newton, were sufficiently impressive for
Voltaire to suggest that the century might be called the ‘Age of the
English’ as well as that of Louis XIV. 1 The remark illustrates the signifi-
cance of the contemporary English contribution to the course of
European thought; previously this had been moulded chiefly by the Latin
tradition in Italy, Spain and France.
None the less, an important forerunner of the British empiricists was
Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), a Frenchman like his contemporary
Descartes. He was not himself a very important scientist, having no
training in mathematics, nor any discoveries to his credit except for the
first clear formulation of the law of inertia. Yet he was a scrupulous
observer, particularly in the field of astronomy, and an admirer of
Copernicus and Galileo. His reputation was based on his restoration and
defence of the doctrines of the ancient Greek atomists, Democritus and
Epicurus. He published this combination of scientific and historical
inquiry in separate works between 1647 and 1649; it appeared as Syntagma
Philosophicum in the posthumous edition of his collected works (1658).
Originally the atomistic hypothesis had derived most of its plausibility
from the a priori argument that the only substances in the world are an
infinite number of imperceptible, simple, and incorruptible particles of
matter, since their motions and interrelations would be sufficient to
account for all processes of generation and destruction in nature. In
Gassendi’s time experimental evidence recommended the theory to
1 Sidcle de Louis XIV, ch. 31 : CEuvres Completes (Paris, 1878), xiv, 535. For the Royal
Society and Newton, see above, ch. in, pp. 50-1, 55-7, 61-5.
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physicists and chemists, and his own particular achievement was to have
adapted ancient atomism, of which there had been earlier expositions, to
the findings of the new science. All the same he superimposed on the
mechanistic philosophy a Christian theology and a belief in final causes
and the spirituality of the soul, thus making it far from homogeneous and
systematic.
One of his leading doctrines was that the source of our knowledge lies
in sense perception. Since he also taught that the qualities of bodies that
strike our senses give rise only to appearances, he was led to the con-
clusion that matter, though independently real, is ultimately unknown.
He derived support for this teaching, which reappeared in Locke and
subsequent developments of English thought, from the ancient sceptic
Sextus Empiricus and Pierre Charron (1541-1603). As a consequence he
adopted a pragmatic outlook, founded on probabilities, and opposed this,
in the important fifth set of Objections to the Meditations (1641), to
Descartes’s initial systematic doubt as well as to his final notion of the
demonstrability of science. An implication of his sceptical attitude was
that the alleged knowledge of atoms and the void, that is, the very founda-
tion of his philosophy, could not itself be empirical but must be derived
from a postulate of reason. The intellect, he in fact came to argue, must
transcend and correct experience. On the other hand, he refused to
accept theories which were not in the last resort confirmed by observation.
His failure was to show exactly how reason and sense perception are
related to one another.
Gassendi’s influence was enhanced by his conceptions of space and time
which he thought are absolute entities though without being either sub-
stance or attribute. On the one hand, this view made a breach in the
time-honoured Aristotelian system of categories; on the other, it consti-
tuted, together with similar theories of Henry More and Isaac Barrow,
the metaphysical framework of Newtonian science. Another scientist who
profited from his doctrines was Robert Boyle (1626-91), though his
corpuscular philosophy differed from Gassendi’s in that he denied that
motion was an intrinsic property of matter. It was precisely this dynamic
aspect of Gassendi’s philosophy that attracted the young Leibniz.
Although Locke rarely acknowledged his debts to previous thinkers, it is
obvious, if only from the testimony of Leibniz, 1 that he owed to Gassendi
the idea of the mind as tabula rasa and the suggestion that matter might be
able to think — two notions which struck at the foundation of Cartesian
orthodoxy. While, apart from a few medical men like Samuel Sorbiere,
Gassendi had no real disciples, many read him with approval in the
abridged and more intelligible representation of his system by Francois
Bernier, which appeared in 1675. One of the reasons why he has been
rarely discussed as one of the pioneers of empiricism is the elusive
1 Nouveaux Essais, Bk. i, ch. i, ab init.
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character of his thought; 1 another is that much of his system soon
appeared obsolete in comparison with the more up-to-date pronounce-
ments of British empiricists.
The first to draw up and advertise persuasively a map of knowledge and
scientific method along the lines of the new experimental philosophy, but
entirely separate from religious truth, was Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
He assumed that the ultimate elements of things and also the sum total of
phenomena were finite in number. Nature should therefore be capable of
being exhaustively known with the help of an adequate theory of induc-
tion. In his Novum Organum (1620) he formulated a method for the
discovery of causal laws, the so-called method of elimination, which he
claimed was far more satisfactory than the traditional argument by simple
enumeration. The basis of inductive proof, he considered, was the
observation and collection of empirical facts. However, he recognised
that there must also be deliberate experiments, a careful sifting of
instances, and an unhampered application of the new method. In his
opinion, the union of the experimental and rational faculty served the
ultimate end of knowledge, that is, the practical one of increasing the
dominion of man over nature. In his celebrated doctrine of the ‘idols’,
moreover, he outlined the causes of error and prej udice which he thought lay
in the way of truth and progress. Although Bacon’s general conception of
the ‘ advancement of learning’ was of considerable importance, his notions
of the functions of theory and scientific reasoning were limited. Hobbes,
Spinoza and Leibniz found little in his system that interested them philo-
sophically ; his influence was felt particularly among the early members of
the Royal Society and the French Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was a more subtle and forceful thinker
than Bacon, though during and after his lifetime he was repudiated as a
radical and an atheist on account of his materialism, his egoistic theory of
human nature, and the man-made political order which he envisaged in
his Leviathan (1651). 2 He spent part of the Civil War in Paris, where on a
previous visit (1634-7) he had been introduced to Father Mersenne
(1588-1648), the centre of a wide and varied intellectual circle. Mersenne
himself was an eclectic and the author of several second-rate books on
natural philosophy. He endeavoured to propagate together reason,
experience, and faith, being as little satisfied with Bacon’s one-sided
empiricism as with Descartes’s high-flown metaphysical ambitions. On
his initiative Gassendi and Hobbes each submitted his own criticism of
Descartes’s Meditations. These two in fact were drawn towards one
another not so much by their common empiricism as by their being
adversaries of Descartes — and harshly treated ones at that. But Hobbes
1 For controversial points in connection with his theory see the addresses in Pierre Gas-
sendi , Centre International de Synthase (Paris, 1955).
2 For Hobbes and the Leviathan , see below, ch. v, pp. 103-5.
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was a better trained mathematician than Gassendi and taught a material-
ism as consistent in principle as the great eighteenth-century systems of
Holbach and La Mettrie. He not only rejected Descartes’s dualism but
also preferred to conceive of matter in terms of motion rather than exten-
sion. His mechanistic philosophy had none the less much in common with
Descartes’s — so much indeed that their correspondence in 1641 was
marred by mutual charges of plagiarism.
Hobbes was particularly stimulated by the problem of sense perception
which, he believed, is motion in external bodies as well as in the organs of
our body. And while pleasure was for h im ‘motion about the heart’ and
thinking ‘motion within the head’, he defined a good object as what
arouses motion towards itself, and endeavour as an incipient movement.
This emphasis on motion was of great significance. In the first place, it
excluded from his conception of science the immobile, immaterial objects
of religious faith. Secondly, it suggested the idea of a purely geometrical
view of nature.
In fact, Hobbes wrote his Short Tract on First Principles (c. 1630), the
forerunner of one of his major works, the De Corpore (1655), a year after
he had become interested in Euclid’s Elements. His claim was that
scientific or philosophical knowledge is exclusively a deductive inquiry
into the efficient causes of motion, as though the relation of cause and
effect were identical with that between the premises and the conclusion of
an argument. This rationalism on his part differed widely from the new
experimental philosophy ushered in by Bacon and practised by the Royal
Society, which in his view in fact was ‘natural history’, not ‘natural
philosophy’. He was doubtless influenced in this connection by Galileo’s
and Harvey’s resolutive-compositive method which formed part of the
Averroistic tradition of the School of Padua. This suggested to him the
idea of causal or genetic definitions according to which phenomena,
including such things as the nature of men or that of civil society, could be
reconstructed rationally from first principles like a geometrical figure.
Hobbes’s problem, of course, was to explain which of several alternative
definitions or causal explanations of a phenomenon was to be accepted as
the right one. For he realised that an hypothesis concerning the causes
underlying an effect is the result of conjecture and may indeed be false,
though the demonstration on which it is based is valid. But while throwing
into relief the empirical basis of knowledge Hobbes, it appears, was not
really interested in experimental verification or factual truth ; at any rate,
he failed to show how these are related to the a priori deductions of science.
Hobbes’s super-nominalism, as Leibniz 1 called it, and his conventionist
theory of truth point in the same direction. In his opinion rational know-
ledge is concerned with universals and hence must begin and end with the
1 Preface to an edition of Nizolius, in Philosophical Papers and Letters , ed. Loemker
(Chicago, 1956), 1, 199.
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use of words; for there is, he thought, ‘nothing in the world universal but
names V Furthermore, he regarded the imposition of names upon objects
as arbitrary and, accordingly, all definitions as stipulative. In the absence
of real meanings of words, truth in his view must lie in the logical con-
nection between words in sentences, to be grasped by a process of formal
‘reckoning’: unlik e the Cartesian intuition by clear and distinct ideas, it
tells us nothing about the real nature of things.
Hobbes’s analysis of language, none the less, promoted the cause of
empiricism. It helped to rid philosophy and science of the belief in
universal essences. In this, as well as in his view that no deductive reason-
ing is itself descriptive of reality, Hobbes was a precursor of Hume and
modem positivism. But in addition to being a staunch empiricist and
materialist he was unquestionably also one of the most thoroughgoing
rationalists of the seventeenth century.
Most other British rationalists of the time adopted a spiritualist meta-
physics and a belief in certain ‘anticipations of the soul’, that is, basic
concepts supposed to be independent of experience. Their target in fact
was Hobbes. Not surprisingly, Descartes’s influence in England had
spread ever since his correspondence with Henry More and the publica-
tion of Sir Kenelm Digby’s treatise on the soul’s immortality (1644).
Another trend of thought which accounted for the rising tide of idealism
and the intellectualist outlook was more particularly ethical and religious
in character. It began with Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648) and
flourished in the remarkable school of Cambridge Platonists, whose
founder was Benjamin Whichcote (1610-83) and whose main representa-
tives were Henry More (1614-87) and Ralph Cudworth (1617-88). A
common characteristic of the Platonists was that, unlike Bacon, Hobbes,
Pascal and Bayle, who all advocated a sharp separation of theology from
philosophy, they sought to form a synthesis between them. After all, this
was an age which, though still dominated by religion, had succeeded in ex-
plaining much that had hitherto appeared mysterious. The general appeal
was to reason or, in Whichcote’s favourite phrase, ‘ the candle of the Lord ’.
Thus Lord Herbert, in his De Veritate (1624), argued for a religious
truth underlying the many particular forms of faith which the mind cannot
help but assent to because it is inborn in man. Acceptance of a natural
rather than a revealed religion was characteristic of deism and also of the
latitudinarian divines of the Church of England. What proved particularly
attractive to the pioneers of eighteenth-century enlightenment was the
contention that moral judgements and all eternal truths are valid in their
own right and not, as Calvin and Descartes had taught, because they are
the expression of a divine decree. This Platonic approach to ethics was the
most important contribution to moral philosophy in the seventeenth
century. Leibniz had a share in it, and also Cudworth with his two books,
1 Leviathan (London, 1651), p. 13.
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The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) and A Treatise con-
cerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, posthumously published in 1731.
His inquiry into the logical issues involved in moral theory set the stage
for the subsequent development of ethical rationalism in England. It was
poles apart from the moral psychology in which the contemporary French
maxim-writers La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere delighted. The meta-
physical writings of the Cambridge Platonists, on the other hand, were not
always free from strange and obscure doctrines such as Cudworth’s theory
of ‘plastic natures ’ or More’s notion of the spiritual nature of space. Their
work also suffered from a diffuseness of thought and a mass of antiquated
erudition. It might never have become the intellectual force that it did in the
following century had it not been given a more polished and informal ex-
pression i n the Characteristics ( 1 7 1 1 ) of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-
1 7 1 3) ,who particularly relished the Platonic doctrines of love and beauty.
John Locke (1632-1704), at one time Shaftesbury’s tutor, was brought
to philosophy by questions very similar to those discussed by the Cam-
bridge Platonists; as shown by his Reasonableness of Christianity (1695),
he remained under the influence of the Latitudinarians until the closing
years of his life. At the same time the empiricism of Gassendi had made
an early impression on him, even before his visit to France (1675-9)
where, among scientists and scholars of every kind, he met the populariser
of Gassendi, Francois Bernier. Personal as well as professional ties also
connected him with Robert Boyle and the group of experimental scientists
responsible for the establishment of the Royal Society; besides he was a
friend and disciple of Thomas Sydenham, the distinguished physician.
Locke was a doctor of medicine himself, preserving throughout his life an
equal interest in the body and in the mind. He wrote with authority on such
different subjects as philosophy, religion, politics, economics, education,
and medicine. He was drawn into public life by Anthony Ashley Cooper,
first Earl of Shaftesbury, after whose downfall he fled to Holland (1683),
whence he returned early in 1689 in the retinue of William of Orange. 1
In one of his first writings, the Latin Essays on the Law of Nature
(composed in 1664), he chose for discussion a topic which was to form
the basis of his influential political teaching in the Treatise of Civil
Government (1690). 2 Two questions were of particular interest to him:
the epistemological question of how natural law is known, and the moral
question of the extent to which this law is binding. His answer to the first
question was an empiricist theory of knowledge, which he developed at
length in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). This work
has been his chief title to fame, not least on account of his method of
investigation, which proved as important as the issue between empiricism
1 For the first Earl of Shaftesbury, see below, ch. xm,pp.306, 314-19; ch.xtv, pp. 332-4,
344 - 5 -
* For Locke and the Two Treatises of Government, see below, ch. v, pp. 1 19-21.
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and rationalism that it was designed to settle. He was the first to regard
philosophy not as a super-science, essentially similar to the other special
sciences, but as a purely critical inquiry with problems of its own. His
object was to study the nature, origin and extent of knowledge. In
adopting this ‘historical, plain method’ and the position of an ‘under-
labourer’ he proved himself courageous as well as unpretentious, for
many of his over-rational contemporaries thought that to be without
large-scale metaphysical aspirations was a declaration of philosophical
bankruptcy. Another important though little appreciated contribution to
philosophy was his study of the nature of words and definition in Book m
of the Essay, he expected this to lead to a new ‘sort of logic and critic’.
However, Locke created confusion at the very outset of his inquiry.
Influenced as he was in several important ways by Descartes, he as well as
Berkeley and Hume after him were convinced that not only when a man
thinks, but also when he perceives an object he is confronted not with real
things immediately but only with his own mental processes or ideas. In
Locke’s use this key-term ‘idea’ remained dangerously vague, denoting
such a variety of things as objects of perception, images, acts of mind, and
concepts. A further difficulty arose in connection with his well-known
doctrine, attacked by both Leibniz and Kant, that all our knowledge is
derived from experience, either sensory or introspective. He weakened
his case by offering a psychological account of the origin of ideas, instead
of arguing that in order to be meaningful concepts must be testable, at
least indirectly, by sensory observation.
Irrespective of how it was formulated, Locke’s denial of innate ideas in
Book i of the Essay was nevertheless significant. It led to the rejection of
the a priori premises from which Descartes and many theologians of the
time had claimed to be able to argue about the universe by the deductive
method alone. Admittedly, like Descartes and Leibniz, he assumed that
the basic constituents of knowledge are simple elements. His achievement
was to be the first to practise with any seriousness a technique of analysis
in conjunction with a thoroughgoing empiricism. Nevertheless he laid him-
self open to the charge that the simplicity of the simple ideas of sense at
which he arrived was a mere assumption and not, as he himself thought,
the result of philosophical analysis.
Another consideration underlying Locke’s ‘new way of ideas’ had
equally puzzling consequences. He argued that, if the distinction between
illusory and veridical perceptions was to be preserved, some ideas at least
must be presumed to refer to things really existing outside of us on which
they causally depend and which they also resemble. It was natural for
him to single out as real the so-called primary qualities of bodies such as
extension, figure, and motion: they could be regarded as both the neces-
sary and sufficient conditions of sensory perception. On the other hand,
the Cartesian doctrine that a mind cannot directly know material objects
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but only its own ideas was too deep-seated to be relinquished. Hence
there arose a crucial difficulty, noticed already by John Sergeant in his
Solid Philosophy Asserted (1697) : how we are to believe in material entities,
know their qualities, and speak of ideas as resemblances of these, if the
entities and qualities in question are not and never could be, even in
principle, directly experienced. The theory was not merely an implausible
hypothesis: it was a philosophical myth. Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), a
more consistent empiricist than Locke, evaded the difficulty by an out-
right rejection of dualism : in his most important book, the Principles of
Human Knowledge (1710), he denied that there was anything but ‘spirits’
and their ideas. Locke, however, though a phenomenalistic analysis of
reality was never far from his mind, felt unable to abandon the traditional
belief in physical qualities and, hence, in material substance. None the
less he looked upon this belief as a mere hypothesis of reason, unjustifiable
on strictly empiricist premises. He admitted that, though the concept of
material substance pointed to some real existence, it was imperfect and
obscure, standing for ‘something, he knew not what’. 1 His startling
suggestion, hotly disputed by Edward Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester
(1635-99), that God might have endowed matter with the power of
thinking arose, as was rightly seen by Voltaire, 2 not from a desire to deny
the immateriality of the soul, but precisely out of his recognition that, pace
Descartes, the nature of material substances remained outside the reach
of knowledge.
Accordingly, Locke made much of the distinction between real and
nominal essences. His contention was that, whereas we are ignorant of
the real essence of, for example, gold, we know its nominal essence, that is,
the ideas of those of its properties that are found regularly conjoined with
one another. However, he noted that no appeal to experience, which
provides us with ideas of particulars but never with any concepts or
general ideas, could explain what qualities are consistently found together
in our concept of a thing. The task, he recognised, could be achieved only
by relying again upon reason. The position he took up in the traditional
dispute concerning the nature of universals was that of conceptualism — a
theory opposed alike to Platonic realism, the Aristotelian doctrine of
substantial forms and Hobbes’s nominalism. On his view, the meaning of
a general name such as ‘gold’ is an abstract general idea in the mind,
derived in the last analysis from the similarities between objects in nature.
His mistake was to assume that for an idea to be general it must display
characteristics that are themselves general. It was Berkeley’s achievement,
so highly praised by Hume, to discover that the generality of an idea lies
entirely in its use and the relation it has to other ideas. Locke regarded
abstract ideas as extremely important, for knowledge, according to him,
1 Essay , Bk. ii, ch. xxm, sect. 2.
2 Lettres phitosophiques (1734), letter xiii, ed. Lanson (Paris, 1909), 1, 170.
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consisted in the perception of the agreement or disagreement of such ideas.
Apart from our own existence and the existence of ‘a God’, of both of
which he claimed to be certain, he accorded certainty of knowledge to
those sciences only which do not refer to real existences. Pure mathe-
matics is of this kind and, in his opinion, moral philosophy too ; whence
arose his favourite, though curious view, held also by Hobbes, Hugo
Grotius, and Spinoza, that ethics is a demonstrable science.
Locke was generally an empiricist, at least in the sense that he rejected
the Cartesian assumption that a priori deductions are descriptive of the
world. Instead he maintained, rightly no doubt, that knowledge of
matters of fact rests on the evidence of particular observations. He never
went so far, however, as to hold that all reasoning is inductive or that we
can ever attain certainty in the natural sciences, for he was by no means a
strict empiricist. The mingling of reason and experience in his theory no
doubt widened its scope, but it also had certain demerits. He failed to
explain satisfactorily the role of each of these two elements in his system
and, although he must have been aware of the tension between them,
already so noticeable in the doctrines of Gassendi and Hobbes, he did not
attempt to el im inate it. His dislike of extremes prevented him from
becoming a consistent idealist or phenomenalist. On the other hand, he
was in some measure a sceptic and thus need not have been unduly dis-
turbed by the neglect of system in his thought. But while he was not a
dogmatist and the least metaphysically inclined of the seventeenth-
century philosophers, he resolutely adhered to certain assumptions. One
of these was his common-sense approach to philosophical problems. This
was attractive in its apparent simplicity, though it lacked the technical
ingenuity necessary for the treatment of some at least of the complicated
questions with which he dealt.
None the less, Locke was a pioneer in a variety of ways. His episte-
mology profoundly stimulated the young Berkeley and came to be
exploited for innovations in religion by Anglicans no less than deists.
Voltaire, Condillac, and afterwards the so-called Ideologues regarded him
as of all philosophers the wisest : he had not, like his rationalist predeces-
sors, written a ‘romance of the soul’ but modestly offered the ‘history’ of
it. Hence on the Continent his method no less than his teaching were
either faithfully propagated or transformed into the principles of the new
sensationalism and associationist psychology.
Very broadly, then, the great rationalist systems of metaphysics, on the
one hand, and the rise of empiricism, on the other, were the chief charac-
teristics of philosophy in the period from Descartes to Locke. The central
issue throughout was that of the relationship between immaterial minds
and physical bodies and of the validity of knowing by way of ideas. The
rationalist philosophers, eager for abstract speculation, started from two
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far-reaching presuppositions. One was that philosophical questions, like
those in mathematics, can be settled by arguments which are not only
plausible but logically compelling. The other was that philosophical
reasoning, though regarded as a priori and deductive, is nevertheless
descriptive of reality. The tendency of the empiricists was to assume that
all the material of knowledge, that is, the meaning of our concepts as well
as the truth of our beliefs, is ultimately derived from observation and that
no conclusions about the world are demonstrable. An undoubted achieve-
ment of empiricism was its elimination of the more abstruse kind of
traditional metaphysics and the substitution of questions which could
be approached on the basis of psychological data, inductive generalisa-
tion, or an analysis of language. The rationalist metaphysicians, on the
other hand, were in their own way equally progressive. Though still
dominated by religious concepts, they were no longer in a strict sense
theologians. In fact their critical and scientific study of man, nature and
truth exercised a considerable leavening influence on traditional theology.
The close alliance, nay fusion, of philosophical thought with the newly
developed root concepts of science — a general feature of the seventeenth
century and unique to Europe — was particularly prominent in Descartes,
Hobbes and Leibniz. These thinkers boldly anticipated subsequent
developments in scientific theory by their mathematical conceptions of
space and motion and their emphasis on the importance of an adequate
logic and methodology. One defect of the metaphysical systems was that
their comprehensive grandeur no less than their aim to render reality
completely intelligible were achieved largely at the cost of artificiality.
Difficulties also arose on account of the still prevalent metaphysical
notion of substance and the common failure to distinguish the idea of
causal connection from that of logical implication. And while, in the field
of moral theory, some rationalist philosophers, such as Spinoza, excelled
in new insights, others, such as Descartes, contributed surprisingly little.
On the other hand, the widespread contention that moral judgements are
valid because of their inherent equity and rationality still had an appeal
for the Age of Enlightenment. Seventeenth-century philosophy, generally,
both in its rationalist and empiricist forms, prepared the way for the ideals
of the eighteenth century — Reason and Humanity. Not that the French
Encyclopaedists, such as Diderot and d’Alembert, or any of the other
so-called philosophes were primarily philosophers. In point of fact they
were, even in scientific inquiry, more historically minded than any of the
seventeenth-century philosophers. All the same, the latter had raised, and
passed on, important new questions : they had made a start which, even if
it was not always the right one, remained fruitful. For, though many of
the doctrines of Descartes and Leibniz, Hobbes and Locke have become
obsolete, their impact, particularly on the theory of knowledge, is still felt
three centuries later.
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POLITICAL THOUGHT
T he seventeenth century has been called the heroic age of rationalism
in Western Europe, and the term does indeed accurately express the
three essential features of the thought of the period. These were,
first, the alliance between the traditions of Galileo and of Descartes —
between the new mathematico-mechanical science and the idea of natural
law — second, the divorce of political thought from theology, and finally,
the capacity of its great minds for creative thought. For there are few
centuries so rich in creative philosophic ability, or in which political
theory so boldly aspires to the utmost heights of intellectual speculation.
But the spell cast by the great philosophers of the period presents a danger
to the historian of its thought. He tends much too easily to confuse their
originality with their influence, their future importance with their
authority among their contemporaries. Many of their most important
ideas are far ahead of their time — ideas which could not be fully developed
in the intellectual climate of the age and did not leave their full mark on
the history of thought until much later. The importance of Spinoza was
first fully revealed by Goethe, that of Leibniz by the German idealists.
That is why, more than in any other period since then, the history of ideas
cannot be considered in vacuo , but must be related to the changing con-
ditions of an age in which the basic problems of political life constantly
take on new forms.
This is particularly true of the period covered by this volume. In the
events with which it deals, the contrast between the two basic political
attitudes around which the conflicts of the seventeenth century took place
is strikingly expressed — the conflict between the glorification of the idea
of Divine Right, which was incarnated in the monarchy of Louis XIV, and
the theory of a social contract based on reason, to which the Glorious
Revolution gave a new and much wider historical significance. These same
events also bring out clearly the shifts in the claim to leadership among
nations in the field of political theory. It is not by accident that there is
no Frenchman among the leading political thinkers of the period. The
ascendancy of France, which in other ways leaves its mark on the whole
period and extends to the most varied fields of artistic and intellectual life,
does not apply in the rarefied atmosphere of political thought. Bodin’s
great discovery, the concept of State sovereignty as a unified and indivisible
power, independent of any other, represents the sole original contribution
of France for a whole century to the doctrines of the age. It was suffi-
ciently clear and embracing to provide a justification for the claim of
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absolute monarchy to internal and external domination. From then on-
wards, absolutist political theory did no more than develop and clarify it.
It has often been emphasised that the moment chosen by Louis XIV
for his decision in favour of personal rule was quite unusually favourable,
both inside and outside France, to the strengthening of royal authority,
since the decision was made at a time of international detente, following
upon two major peace treaties, when religious conflicts were becoming less
insistent ; while the institution of monarchy was becoming more and more
firmly established, as ‘ the King in Council ’ freed himself from the tutelage
of all-powerful prime ministers and himself became the visible focus of all
governmental activity. Throughout Europe the revolutionary upheavals
and other signs of crisis of the mid-century left behind them an over-
whelming desire for peace, which was reflected in the world of ideas and
only served to emphasise in men’s minds the advantages of undisputed
monarchical authority.
All this must be borne in mind if we are to understand the powerful
attraction exerted by the monarchy of Louis XIV in its own time — an
attraction based in part on his successes in the field of power politics, but
corresponding also, to some extent at least, to a common and unifying
concept of the ideal ruler, which set its stamp on every European mon-
archy. The student of the history of political ideas must therefore take
into account Louis’s own conception of himself and of the profession of
monarchy. The active statesman — especially if he is successful — will only
rarely feel the need to theorise about the purpose and the juridical basis of
his position. His conception of the limits, the duties and the ethics of his
calling arises normally from his practical experiences; it is put into
writing only in the documents associated with that activity, which are
destined for day-to-day practice. So it was with Louis XIV, whose
political ideas and concepts can be deduced, if at all, only from a source
of this kind — from the Instructions pour le Dauphin, which date from 1666
and 1667. These are generally referred to under the misleading title of
‘Memoirs of Louis XIV’, though they belong rather to the category of
‘political testaments’; for their most important content is a portrait of
the model king, such as France needed, the quintessence of principle
and experience, which the king wished the heir to the throne to take to
heart. It is true that this work was not the product of the king’s own
hand; it was worked up by secretaries from notes and general indications,
but it can fairly be considered, in spite of much ornamentation and
literary embellishment in its drafting, as the mirror of his ideas and of his
concept of monarchy.
In its concept of absolute power, the work follows traditional lines: the
king is the viceregent of God upon earth; his guiding star is the salus
publica ; his rule of conduct is dictated by his own conscience, for which he
is answerable to no mortal being. In this document, however, the divine
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mission has become little more than a conventional formula. The ways in
which he fulfils the function of a ruler and the scope of its possibilities are
explained, not by attributing them to the inspiration of a divine and
mystic grace, but by means of an eminently rational psychology. The
position of the monarch, superior to all mortals, is seen as the source of
special qualities, which the ruler possesses irrespective of any ability and
experience he may have. He acquires his profound political insight and
capacity for decision as a result of the unparalleled range of vision which
he alone possesses — because he is born to rule and called to the office by
birth and by right of inheritance. This enables the monarch to get extra-
ordinary results from the intelligence and common sense which he shares
with other mortals. Indeed, this elevated viewpoint puts him in a position
to do even more : to observe with a certain detachment the conflict between
reason and passion within himself, and to take the right side at the right
moment. It is, however, only the concurrent effect of his own zealous
labours, of /’ action and of le grand travail, which gives meaning to la place
elevee of the ruler and justifies it before God and man. Thus, the Instruc-
tions pour le Dauphin becomes simply an admonition to unceasing
activity in the practice of the metier du Roi, an attempt to inspire loathing
of mere regal dignity, divorced from the active functions of monarchy.
It has often been pointed out that the whole work proclaims only the
glory of Louis XIV himself. His effort to be seen everywhere as the sole
source of decision goes so far that not one of those ancestors who pre-
pared the way for absolute monarchy in France is mentioned by name.
Yet it would be an error to see in this work only an inflated picture of
Louis’s search for power and glory. Its real emphasis is on the total
identification of State and ruler. Even the apocryphal ‘l’Etat, c’est moi’
loses the frivolous undertone often attributed to it if one sees the phrase
in the fuller form which Louis XIV himself gave to it in the Memoires :
‘ Quand on a l’Etat en vue, on travaille pour soi. Le bien de Fun fait la
gloire de l’autre.’ The moi of the ruler expresses itself in action, in hard
work, and so becomes the essence, the mainspring of the State; and in
the same way, the State is bound up with the king’s person; his gloire
increases its power and prestige, and nothing gives him such a sense of
fulfilment as tireless labour in the service of the State. There is no con-
ceptual separation between the personal sphere and that of the State,
between the desire for glory — the ruler’s passion dominante — and the
interest of the State.
In this respect, the Memoires may be seen as typical evidence of a
certain ‘modernisation’ of the doctrine of absolutism. Beneath the sur-
face, even of Louis’s ideas, a certain traditional notion of religious duty is
still clearly discernible; but this is emptied of its true content by a new
and purely psychological interpretation of the natural self of the ruler and
its development — an interpretation which, even at this stage, appears
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to require scarcely any support from theological and ethical arguments.
The old theory of the monarchy jure divino is, as it were, supported and
corroborated by arguments much closer to those of seventeenth-century
rationalism, in a way which links the Memoires with one of the great
literary traditions that reached their peak in the France of Louis XIV, the
‘moralising’ observation of human nature in its psychological relation-
ship to its social environment. In any case, the problem of the juridical,
ethical and religious limits which this ‘highest self’ of the ruler might, at a
pinch, be compelled to recognise is not seriously raised. The reduction
of all political rights and all political wisdom to his ‘ natural self’ fore-
shadows the exaggeration and degeneration of the later years of Louis’s
reign. In the rosy dawn of the grand regne, in the intoxication of his first
impetuous successes, the young ruler could not yet understand the basic
moral problem of absolute monarchy, the inevitable discrepancy between
the limited abilities of a mortal monarch and the theoretically unlimited
power which he wielded. Nor could the rational psychology of the
Memoires solve this problem either; at best, it could conceal it. The search
for a theoretical solution could not begin until the problem itself had
become clearly visible, and that was not possible until the French sup-
porters of absolutism had looked back and thought hard about the divine
mission of monarchy. This precisely was the method chosen by the most
brilliant and eloquent interpreter of the monarchy of Louis XIV, by
Bossuet.
It is characteristic of the range of Bossuet’s mind that his activities
covered the most varied fields and were expressed in the most varied
literary forms. A thorough appreciation of his political thought would
have to cover all of them — the theologian and historian of the Discours sur
Vhistoire universe lie as well as the polemical theologian of the Histoire des
Variations, the specialist in ecclesiastical policy of De I'Eglise Gallicane,
the eloquent preacher of the Oraisons funebres and the interlocutor of
Leibniz in the great interconfessional argument of the century. Here,
however, we must limit ourselves to the only one of his works which was
political in the narrower sense, the Politique tiree des propres paroles de
I'Ecriture saint e, which was begun in the prime of his life — in 1677 — and
occupied him until his death.
Bossuet’s Politique is not a work of pure theory. On the contrary, it
served an eminently practical purpose, the education of the Dauphin, a
matter which, in an absolute monarchy, was a matter of public interest.
The unusual title is both misleading and rooted in the conditions of the
time. It gives the impression that Bossuet wished to deny to politics, and
therefore also to the State, the right to exist independently of theology.
It seems to put the authority of the Bible in the place of rational and
systematic examination of the nature of the State, and indeed the title has
often been so understood; or rather misunderstood, for, in fact, the
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biblical foundation of Bossuet’s argument, if not precisely superficial, is
certainly not a basic one. One might say that the biblical basis serves less
to support his own arguments than to refute those of his opponents, and
especially the Protestant theories of the right of resistance, which claimed
biblical justification and so had to be refuted from the Bible.
Yet Bossuet’s frequent use of biblical quotations cannot conceal the
fact that the view of history and politics developed in the Politique is
certainly not inspired by Holy Writ. The Bible is used only to emphasise
what Bossuet in any case believes to be true. Basically, reason suffices, in
his view, both to reveal the principes primitifs qui ont fonde les empires and
to answer the great question of the century, the problem of the origin and
nature of State and society. Bossuet is thus able to allow the secular
world, within certain limits, to determine its own laws and to explain
history and politics from knowledge of itself and of human nature — for
the theologian in him knows these things to be subject to a divine plan of
salvation, beyond human understanding. In Bossuet’s view, the power of
the State has its origin not only in divine ordinance, but also in natural
necessity. It is only nature’s inevitable subjection of everyone to the
sovereign that makes the anarchic multitudo into a State. This view is
strikingly reminiscent of Hobbes; so much so, indeed, that a direct
influence of Hobbes on Bossuet has been suggested. The existence of such
an influence can be neither proved nor disproved. Bossuet certainly knew
Hobbes, whose works were known in the France of Louis XIV in several
translations. It is therefore quite possible that the most revolutionary
thinker of the century supplied the conservative Bossuet with arguments
which the latter adapted to his own needs and reconciled with the dogma
of original sin — a strange intellectual cross-current which, however,
looks less strange if it is seen against the background of its own time.
For what most impressed the continental readers of Hobbes and what
they most easily understood was not the hidden revolutionary con-
tent of his teachings, the rational derivation of absolute power from the
contract of submission, but the way in which it could be used to disprove
the subversive theories of the right of resistance and so to support the
authority of the legitimate ruler.
Bossuet, of course, knows that there have been many forms of State
and government since classical times, and he is careful not to present
monarchy as the only form of legitimate authority. Basically, in his view,
any form of authority is beyond criticism once it has become hallowed by
tradition and has achieved a certain degree of stability. But monarchy
comes nearest to divine intention, because it is farthest removed from
anarchy and offers the best guarantees of peace and order. In the
Politique, Bossuet sees in monarchy four essential characteristics: it is
sacred, paternal, absolute, and in harmony with reason. The first of these
characteristics describes its origin, the third its range, while the second and
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fourth, which are references to the duties of the ruler, can be no more than
moral qualities; they have no vis coactiva, only a vis directiva, for the
conduct of the monarch, but they are of quite special importance in
Bossuet’s political thought, since they form the basis of the vital distinc-
tion which he makes between gouvernement absolu and gouvernement
arbitraire. For gouvernement arbitraire, in Bossuet’s view, is the exact con-
trary of any ordered regime, and therefore the contrary also of gouverne-
ment absolu, properly understood. All that the two have in common is
that, in both, the supreme power is subject to no human control. But in
the one, the subjects are slaves, sacrificed to a lawless arbitrariness which
makes it barbare et odieux ; while in the other, they enjoy the effective
protection of an authority bound by the specific traditions and com-
mands of reason, a rule which accepts the limitations set by God for all
mortals. And Bossuet described these limits with all the vigour of his
rhetoric, when he said to the kings, ‘Vous etes les enfants du Tres Haut;
c’est lui qui a etabli votre puissance pour le bien du genre humain. Mais,
6 dieux de chair et de sang, 6 dieux de boue et de poussiere, vous mourrez
comme des hommes’.
This distinction between gouvernement arbitraire and gouvernement
absolu contains an implicit tribute to the particular Etat monarchique in
which Bossuet lived and for which he wrote. For there, in its oldest and
most venerable form — in the French hereditary monarchy — the links
between gouvernement absolu and a traditional juridical order must have
seemed to him to be revealed in exemplary fashion. Bossuet also knew
and used the concept, which in France in particular had so many different
meanings, of lois fondamentales, but he extended its meaning beyond those
usual in his age, by including in it not only personal freedom, but also
the inviolability of private property. In this, Bossuet set himself apart from
the most extreme exponents of absolutism, who insisted that the absolute
power of the monarch extended to the life and property of his subjects.
La Bruyere described this idea, in a well-known passage of his Caracteres
as ‘le langage de la flatterie’ ; but he knew perfectly well that it was used
not only by flatterers, but also by serious writers, to whom it appeared
to be derived with a certain logic from the notion of pouvoir absolu.
And Louis XIV, in his Memoires, himself accepted the notion in principle.
Bossuet’s Politique cannot be classed among the greatest and most
profound political writings of the century. It is too eclectic in its mixture
of theology and raisonnement, too full of special pleading, to be included
among the writings of the great thinkers of the period. In particular, it is
not a work of philosophy, but belongs rather, like its author and the State
which it served, to the old world in which politics and theology were one,
and which the new age was leaving behind. Yet it is precisely its intel-
lectual contradictions which make it the faithful expression of a form of
authority which found its raison d'etre and its legal justification in its own
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existence, in the imposing weight of power which it embodied, in its own
achievements, in the capacity for survival which it promised, and in the
radiance of religious inspiration which surrounded it. All this was
brought together and developed in Bossuet’s Politique and supported by
two arguments which, together, must have seemed illuminating and com-
pelling to his contemporaries : he justified the institution of monarchy by
appealing both to the will of God and to earthly utility. On the one hand,
he pointed to the incomparable stability which made absolute monarchy
superior to all other forms of government. On the other, by making
tradition the most effective basis of all legality, he was also able to show
how its beneficent influence in the day-to-day working of government
made the unlimited power of the monarch bearable — how it allowed the
humblest of the king’s subjects to feel himself part of an ordered society,
based on law and sanctified by tradition, and so binding also on the
absolute ruler, for whom the care and protection of his subjects was the
highest duty. Bossuet’s Lieutenant de Dieu is no Leviathan, whose power
extends in terrifying uniformity over a mass of isolated individuals; his
authority extends over the State and a complex hierarchy of subjects, to
whom he is bound by a common respect for ancient customs and well-
tried institutions.
Bossuet’s weakness, which he shares with all the great traditionalists of
political thought, is that, in his eyes, law and habit become confused, so
that the survival of a regime is the decisive criterion of its legitimacy. It is
significant that the focal point of his political theory is the idea of ‘pre-
scription’, which a hundred years later was to become the key word of
Burke’s conservative view of politics. When Bossuet wrote, absolutism in
France had reached a peak which could not be surpassed, either in reality
or in theory. Bossuet stands at the end of a long process of historical
maturation, and the theories which he had formulated supplied, right up
to the end, the theoretical justification of the regime which he exalted.
But the principle of the sovereignty of the people, the force which ulti-
mately defeated the monarchic regime of which Bossuet painted so radiant
a picture, was clearly and menacingly visible in the background. Bossuet
lived to see the challenge of this force in the polemical works of Jurieu and
Levassor. When the Politique was written, however, at the peak of the
grand regne, the dangerously explosive power of the newer theory
appeared to have been held in check, as it had never been before, by the
conquering and driving force of the monarchic idea. This was the greatest
hour of that absolutist doctrine which, indeed, was to reach the peak of its
appeal in the very country in which it had been most seriously challenged
— in England.
To the historian, and in the light of later developments, the English
Restoration looks like a short-lived constitutional compromise; but to
contemporary observers it was very much more. Its easy and bloodless
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victory looked like the passing of a divine judgement against anarchy and
rebellion — a judgement in favour of hereditary monarchy, which had
found its anointed martyr in the person of Charles I. It is perhaps sur-
prising that the theory of the Divine Right of kings was most pungently
formulated, not in the France of Louis XIV, but in the England of
Charles II — a fact which can be understood only if one looks back to the
great constitutional conflict which shook England in the first half of the
century. Part of the essence of this conflict was that it was bound to
illustrate more clearly than in any other country the two great conflicting
political principles of the age. Nobody ever proclaimed the absolutist
theory of government in more striking or more challenging fashion than
the extraordinary royal savant who ruled when the argument began, and
nowhere else was the contrary notion of the right of resistance stated with
such emphasis. In the Great Rebellion this theory carried all before it and
conquered the State itself, until it created its own negation in the Crom-
wellian dictatorship. The right of resistance, however, would never have
been able to develop its overwhelming force had it not been intimately
linked with the impulses of a religious mass movement: the Stuart
monarchy was foredoomed to defeat in the struggle with parliament
because it had identified itself with the hated episcopacy and so challenged
the religious beliefs of the mass of the population. The acute mind of
Thomas Hobbes was quick to grasp the connection between the two, and
if, as is possible, it was this perception that first gave a revolutionary turn
to his thought, then we may say that this too was a product of the
conditions of the time.
Although Hobbes’s greatest political work, the Leviathan, was not
published until 1651, it is a part of a comprehensive philosophical system,
of which the essential features had been formulated at an earlier date. It
grew out of Hobbes’s conviction that the relationships between human
activities can be stated as accurately as geometry states the relationships
between the sizes of given figures. In this work the mathematical thought
of the period, of which Hobbes was one of the pioneers, is applied with
the greatest boldness and the most rigorous logic to the phenomena of
social and political life. In Hobbes’s view, only pure reason and the
mathematical method derived from it can validly be applied to the
observation of public life; all previous philosophising about the State,
law and society appears to him to be determined by passion and dogmatic
prejudice. Starting from this conviction, the powerful mind of Thomas
Hobbes develops a pessimistic anthropology, which was not uninfluenced
by the depressing experience of the English Civil War. The natural
impetus of fear, the power of which Hobbes had himself experienced,
becomes the fundamental principle of a system of political thought in
which all human activities, including political behaviour, are seen as
deriving from the need for security and self-preservation. This is a
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fundamental rejection of the classic Aristotelian theory of natural law.
What has led man to create the State is not his social nature, but the
demands of reason, which teach him to avoid violent death as the worst
evil. Like every other permanent human relationship, the State arises, not
from benevolence, but from mutual fear. In order to avoid the state of
nature, the bellum omnium contra omnes, the individual accepts uncondi-
tional subjection to the will of one singular individual, who thus becomes
the ‘great Leviathan’, invested with supreme power. In these circum-
stances, the precise form of government represented by Leviathan is
comparatively unimportant, but Hobbes makes it clear that he regards
monarchy as being in practice the best, because it is in monarchy that the
merging of State and sovereignty is most clearly embodied.
It was Hobbes who gave the widest interpretation to this concept of
sovereignty, so popular among his contemporaries, and who attributed to
the sovereign the most complete right of domination ever conceded by
one man to another; his power, in Hobbes’s view, is quite literally
unlimited. Sovereignty is the fountain of justice, the creator of law, and
its powers extend to the most intimate spheres of private life. For
Hobbes’s Leviathan knows no freedom of property, of thought, or of
religion. The State is the sole interpreter of all laws, spiritual and profane.
God’s commandments are transmitted through the mouth of the civil
power. The Church and its services have no genuine religious mission ;
their function is solely to provide the all-powerful State with the appear-
ance of religious authority. In the last analysis, the State itself is deified,
for its authority destroys any personal responsibility, even in religious
matters. This merciless ‘mortal God’ owes its raison d’etre to the services
it performs and to the need for security felt by the individuals subject to
its power without any rights. That is the strange paradox to which
Hobbes’s political philosophy can ultimately be reduced. Its beginning
and end are the self-interest of the isolated individual, who by cold
calculation entrusts himself to the protection of an all-powerful State.
This utilitarian motive in Hobbes’s thinking sharply distinguishes his
doctrine from all the modem forms of totalitarianism, with which it is
often wrongly compared.
The teaching of Hobbes thus defends the most extreme form of
absolutist thinking and at the same time deprives it of its spell-binding
power. In his materialist and hedonistic philosophy, the State loses the
last shred of that divine consecration with which the imagination of even
the boldest thinkers had found it necessary to surround the God-given
authority and its anointed instrument. This, more than anything else,
reveals the unbridgeable gulf between Hobbes and his national environ-
ment, that of Restoration England, under which his long life, spanning
three generations, came to its end. While in continental Europe he was
long considered one of the greatest thinkers — so much so that others
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totally hostile to him nevertheless borrowed ideas from him — the English
persisted in seeing in him ‘the father of unbelief’ and in his notorious
myth of Leviathan the Medusa’s head of despotism and arbitrary govern-
ment. Did not Leviathan find its only empirical realisation in the dic-
tatorship of Cromwell, to which Hobbes half rallied, thus betraying the
royal cause? Thus, in English eyes, there was attached to the already
doubtful reputation of Hobbes the memory of the great break with
tradition from which his own theory of the State had in fact arisen. It
was the healing of this breach with tradition that gave meaning and pur-
pose to the restored monarchy. The only theory on which the Restoration
could and must be based was the buried tradition of the English mon-
archy — a tradition authoritarian, but not tyrannical, appealing both to
sentiment and to political reason, and based on natural succession instead
of on some artificially created sovereignty. Such a system could afford
less than any other to renounce divine institution as the source of its
legitimacy. All these advantages were united in the old theory of the
Divine Right of kings, now revived in a form more appropriate to its time.
The royalist slogans of the civil war — non-resistance, indefeasible
hereditary rights, passive obedience — became significantly fashionable
slogans expressing loyalty to the restored monarchy.
It is typical both of the popularity of the theory of Divine Right and of
its limited potentialities that in Restoration England it had innumerable
devotees, but no new theoretician of the first rank. In Sir Robert Filmer’s
Patriarcha, dating from the Civil War, the doctrine found its manifesto.
Published posthumously as late as 1680, this work ran rapidly through
several editions and became widely known. It is noteworthy neither for
profundity of thought nor for any literary quality. Presumably, it
would long ago have been forgotten if Locke’s famous refutation of it in
his First Treatise of Civil Government had not ensured it a place in the
history of political thought. The fact, however, that Locke thought it
worth the effort of refutation shows the importance of the place it
occupied in the political literature of its time.
Not the least of the reasons for the success of the Patriarcha was its
especially skilful linking of the two major arguments for the supremacy of
monarchy: its divine origin and its justification in nature and reason.
Filmer unequivocally laid his main emphasis on the second of these
arguments, for he probably vaguely felt that it carried greater conviction
than the arbitrary mixture of biblical quotations on which his proof of the
divine origin or monarchy inevitably rested. While the majority of the
defenders of the theory of divine right based their proof of the legitimacy
of hereditary monarchy and of its divine sanction on the existence of
kingship in biblical history, Filmer chose the opposite route. Since (he
says) monarchy is in harmony with nature, it must be inspired and
created by God. His whole argument rests on the equation of monarchy
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and family, of royal and paternal authority. In this thesis, the ancient
metaphor which made of the king the father of his people is used to pro-
vide reasoned proof of the absolutist doctrine, so that Filmer became in
fact the founder of a patriarchal theory of State and society. This theory
provided the defenders of monarchy with a new argument, which called
in the aid of natural law, without casting doubt on the divinity of mon-
archy. For Filmer, too, the Bible remained the ultimate source of all
political wisdom, but he saw it, not as a mere arsenal of quotable texts,
but as an authentic account of the origin and character of early society
and its monarcho-patriarchal form of government. He felt what had
not occurred to Hobbes and Locke and all the supporters of the contract
theory — that society is the natural and necessary condition of the exist-
ence of individual human beings, and not the artificial creation of an
individual or group decision. This belief took him back to something very
like the great Aristotelian theory of the origin of the State. But, by
claiming that the patriarchal society described in the Old Testament was
in fact the only natural model for all times, he put himself into a danger-
ously exposed position, in Which his theory was destined sooner or later
to fall victim to the remorseless logic of the modern theory of natural law.
The critical eye of Locke was quick to see that the weak spot in his
theory was the unbridgeable gulf between modern society and the primi-
tive form of the patriarchal State, and he had no difficulty in proving that
the beginnings of political society, as shown in the Bible, are anything but
natural. The force of Filmer’s argument was inevitably weakened by his
attempt to make patriarchal authority the source of all political rights and
to trace the modem State — which to Filmer meant hereditary monarchy —
back to Adam. The fact that this was indeed the rational culmination of
the theory of Divine Right helped to create a reaction against it, and so led
to a movement which ultimately replaced Divine Right by new and more
logical conceptions of the origin of State and society.
There is a certain historical significance in the fact that, while Bossuet
was writing his Politique in France and the theory of the Divine Right of
kings was attaining the status of an official doctrine in England, in
Holland died a lonely thinker who also found himself justifying absolute
power, though he started from quite different premises and reached his
conclusions in spite of himself. Baruch Spinoza has often been closely
likened to Hobbes — even by his contemporaries, who misunderstood him,
and saw him, above all, as a great atheist; and indeed, the similarities
between Spinoza and Hobbes were by no means superficial. They had in
common an urge to find a rational explanation of the universe, belief in a
method of thought based on the more geometrico , the great importance
they attached to power and the will to power, and a basically pessimistic
view of human nature, which they both saw as governed by passion and
desire. But this community of views had as its background two totally
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different conceptions of the universe. While in the Hobbesian system all
relationships are interpreted in materialist and mechanistic terms, in
Spinoza’s they are rooted in a transcendental universal system, in which
God and nature are fused into a single whole and all the dissonances of
the world of nature are linked sub specie aeterni in a heavenly harmony.
Even the ‘war of all against all’ in the state of nature, which the mechan-
istic thinking of Hobbes saw simply and brutally as a fact, is illuminated
in Spinoza’s theory by a philosophy, monistic and pantheistic at the same
time, which raises the power of natural things to an instrument of the
eternal power of God. It is this notion, leading, as it does, to Hegel,
which gives to Spinoza’s thought its historical significance and assigns to
him a special place among the thinkers of his time. And yet this stem,
cool mind, apparently so independent of environmental influences, clashed
with the political reality of the times of which, as a thinker, he was far
ahead. His basic political ideas were the product of the tension between
his ethical ideal and the real world as he saw it : indeed, there is much to
suggest that his ideas changed along with reality.
Spinoza discussed political problems in detail in two works: the
Tract at us theologico-politicus, which he wrote before 1665, and the
Tractatus politic us, which was still unfinished when he died in 1677.
Between these two dates, experience added to his understanding of
politics, and the result was a certain number of characteristic modifica-
tions in his later work. Spinoza acquired his experience in a country
which, in its time, was regarded as the bastion of political liberty and the
pioneer of religious toleration. It was in the Netherlands, and perhaps
only in the Netherlands, that those who had been expelled on religious
grounds from their own countries could live unmolested. Even there,
however, they lived totally withdrawn from the world, under the jealous
eye of an orthodox clergy, their contacts limited to a few patrons and
friends. Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus was judged in the most
severe terms by both the spiritual and secular authorities of the Republic,
and this fact soon brought him to a certain community of fate with fol-
lowers of sects like the Mennonites, who enjoyed a limited and perpetually
threatened toleration and were in close contact with the Independents and
Congregationalists, who represented English Puritanism. It seems certain
that he became familiar with them and came to know something of their
ideal of a democratically governed Church : how far this in turn affected
his basic political beliefs is a much-discussed question. One cannot help
noting that, in the Tractatus theologico-politicus, direct democracy —
majority rule at meetings of equal citizens — is presented as the ‘most
natural’ form of government, and is used by Spinoza to explain the
origin of the State and the nature of sovereignty. It must be admitted that
the State which originates in this way has all the essential characteristics
of that of Hobbes ; but its basic political democracy remains an ideal, even
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though in practice it leads to the same type of omnipotent State as in
Hobbes. In a celebrated phrase of the Tractatus theologico-politicus, ‘the
true purpose of the State is liberty’, the same notion emerges as the
ultimate purpose of all forms of political organisation.
Spinoza’s final answer to the question, ‘ What is the best kind of State?’
will never be known, since the surviving fragment of the Tractatus
politicus breaks off at the decisive point, when Spinoza comes to the prob-
lem of democracy. But his original attitude must by then have become
somewhat less dogmatic, as is shown by the fact that, at this point, he
brings into the argument the other two classical types of regime,
monarchy and aristocracy, and uses them as pegs on which to hang a
discussion of the nature and functions of the best possible regime. There
is, indeed, much to suggest that this modification was prompted by his
experience of the particular regime under which he was living. As in all
the ‘republics’ of the time, both the political structure and the social
basis had a markedly aristocratic stamp; this became even more marked
in Spinoza’s day, as the popular and dynastic counterweight to aristo-
cracy — the institution of the Stadholderate under the Princes of Orange —
yielded much of its power and influence to the patrician merchant class,
whose spokesman, the Grand Pensionary John de Witt, was the leading
figure in the States General. 1 This widely cultured and philosophically
minded statesman had contacts with Spinoza which have often been
overestimated. It is nevertheless certain that Spinoza was one of de Witt’s
admirers and became familiar with the politics of his elective homeland
after he had settled in The Hague in 1669. He was living at the political
centre of a prosperous State which encouraged a flourishing culture. It
may well be that the evidence of his own eyes suggested to him that the
intellectual freedom to which he attached so much importance was better
protected under such a regime than in a democracy, with the unpredict-
able emotional mass movements which in his century were nearly always
closely linked with religious passions.
Spinoza must himself have witnessed the collapse of this regime, to
which he was so favourably disposed, amid the frightening violence of a
fanatical mob. He appears actually to have been an eye-witness of the
assassination of John de Witt and his brother after the French invasion of
the Netherlands in 1672. 2 This event was the starting-point of a long war,
in which for the time being Louis XIV was victorious. And this victory
was the victory also of absolute monarchy over an aristocratic republic,
of a continental great power over a nation of merchants and sailors, of
an offensive over a defensive policy, of material strength over moral
principles. The whole affair revealed that not even the freest constitution
can guarantee internal and external security. Even an intellectual recluse
like Spinoza could not escape this conclusion, and it was certainly his own
1 See below, ch. xn, pp. 279-91. 2 See below, ch. xn, pp. 293-4.
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distressing experience which led to the striking modification of his
political thought in his last work : ‘ the function of the State is purely and
simply to guarantee peace and security; it follows that the best State is
that in which men live their lives in concord and in which their rights are
inviolate’.
Thus, Spinoza too ends his great monologue on the place of reason in
the State with the resigned allocation of the intellectual to the private
sphere of freedom of thought. This was, in essence, a deliberate com-
promise which the rational free-thinker of the age concluded with the
all-powerful State of the century. Power belongs to the State and — since
might and right are synonymous — the State also has the right to do
whatever contributes to its own survival. Precisely for that reason, how-
ever — in the interests of raison d'etat — it will concede the right of freedom
of thought to the individual who unreservedly recognises its authority.
At bottom, what leads Spinoza to justify the all-powerful State is the
same individualistic motive as that of Hobbes, the idea of the State as
guarantor of one’s own security and of freedom of thought, though in
Spinoza’s case the notion was more deeply felt and perhaps more fully
thought out. In spite of the idealistic impulse that lay behind his
philosophy, Spinoza could not free his mind from the utilitarian tangle to
which the limitations of seventeenth-century thought condemned him.
These limitations are, first, the habit, induced by the acceptance of
natural-law theories, of looking at the State in the light of the common
needs of individuals, and second, the political and constitutional circum-
stances of the time, which made even the most original and independently
minded thinker permanently conscious of the threat to his right to think
and, indeed, to his very existence. No political thinker could escape the
problem of security which dominated the whole epoch and constituted an
important, though often hidden and unadmitted, basis of their confronta-
tion with political reality. Spinoza encountered political reality in one of
the principal storm-centres of a period of great decisions. A contemporary,
a man of exactly the same age, Samuel von Pufendorf, met it in the relative
calm of the German and Scandinavian principalities. This fact alone
throws a significant light on the special features which historical and
national factors gave to the natural-law theories of the seventeenth
century in Germany.
In Germany, as elsewhere, the middle of the century constitutes a great
historical turning-point : indeed, it was in Germany that the change was,
perhaps, most marked and most visible. The Peace of Westphalia con-
firmed the long and difficult rise of the German principalities to the rank
of independent States. It was on the ruins left by war that the victorious
power of the absolute princely State was built, and it was in these small
German States, rather than in the great monarchies, that the individual
felt most keenly the pressure of absolutism. Yet the narrowness of political
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life in these States was not wholly constricting; in some ways, German
political thought gained by it. German political thinkers accepted as
gladly as those elsewhere the combination of the new mathematical
science and natural law; but the special conditions in which they worked
in Germany led them to add a new current, of some importance in the
history of political ideas, to the great philosophic stream of West
European thought. Within the easily surveyed area of the small German
State, political thinkers were inevitably in close contact with facts.
Precisely because the State intervened in every aspect of life, and because
this made any secure intellectual life or scientific activity possible only in
the form of service to the princes — as university teacher, legal adviser or
diplomat — political theory was almost always concerned with day-to-day
political experience, and so tended more easily than elsewhere to absorb
the results of empirical studies, like history and finance, which pro-
vided it with assured fields of knowledge and brought it down nearer to
earth.
The consequences of the Thirty Years War helped to cement this
alliance between political theory and day-to-day political experience; for
the war and its results both presented the German principalities with a
whole series of practical problems as well as problems of constitution and
public law, which had first of all to be considered and resolved on the
theoretical plane. In their attempts to meet both types of problem, the
governments of the principalities found an ideal ally in the greatest
intellectual force of the century, the concept of secularised natural law.
This offered the strongest possible support to a claim to sovereignty
which could not appeal, as the older monarchies had done, to the doctrine
of Divine Right. Its undenominational character also gave it a special
value at a time when the religious energies of the country in which the
Reformation was bom had been exhausted. And in principalities which
were too small and too poor to leave much scope for the growth of power
politics, the material and moral welfare of their subjects was considered
the highest and indeed the true purpose of the State. As early as the
seventeenth century, the influence of the theory of natural law was thus
responsible for bringing about in Germany — and in Germany only — an
alliance between absolutism and the enlightenment. It was no accident
that, when Spinoza was being slandered by ecclesiastical circles throughout
Europe, he was offered a university chair by a German Elector, Charles
Louis of the Palatinate, son of the ‘Winter King’, who tried to compen-
sate for the misery caused by his father, not only by repairing the material
damage of war, but also by a far-seeing policy of toleration.
Such was the political and intellectual background of the work of the
most constructive German political thinker of the time, Samuel von
Pufendorf, who was bom in the middle of the war, in 1632. His family
circumstances were modest; his father was a Protestant clergyman in
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Saxony, who wanted his son to become a theologian; but Pufendorf
turned to the study of law, philosophy and the natural sciences. At Jena,
he came under the influence of the mathematician and philosopher
Weigel, who later also taught Leibniz. It was he who introduced Pufen-
dorf to Descartes’s Discours de la Methode and perhaps also to Galileo’s
picture of the physical world. Thus Pufendorf came into contact with the
new and dominant intellectual current of his age, and at the same time, in
the works of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, he encountered the new
world of natural law. As tutor in the family of the Swedish Ambassador
at Copenhagen, he came into involuntary contact with world affairs,
for on the outbreak of the Danish-Swedish war in 1659 he was arrested
and spent eight months in captivity. He used his enforced leisure to write
his first book, the Elementa Jurisprudentiae Universalis. To Pufendorf, as
to the other great legal mind of the age, Grotius, imprisonment without
cause and for purely political reasons provided an experience which
formed the background to reflections on the principles of natural law.
On his release, he went to Holland where his political and historical
horizon was much widened. But it was not by accident that he found his
professional fulfilment in the service of a German prince, as holder of the
chair of Politics and Natural Law in the University of Heidelberg. In this
post, however, Pufendorf was not so much an academic lawyer as a
philosopher and political writer. It was not until he went to Lund,
whither he was called by the king of Sweden, that he became Professor
of Natural and International Law. It was in Sweden in 1672 that he
published his chief work, under the title of De jure naturae et gentium, and
established his European reputation. During the later years of his life his
transformation into a historian was accomplished : while in the service of
the king of Sweden he wrote a history of the Swedish Empire, and he died
as court historiographer of the Elector of Brandenburg.
These facts indicate the circumstances, in some respects typical of the
age, within which a German scholar and publicist could move in the
seventeenth century. They also reveal the special place to which Pufendorf
is entitled in the development of the theory of natural law. His aim was to
develop it into a system by bringing together various disciplines and their
methods. He combined the studies of philosophy, history and the
mathematical sciences and sought to fuse into a single new union the
different approaches of these disciplines. This combination of mathe-
matical proof and empirical investigation is his most original contribution
to knowledge, but it also imposed limitations on his field of vision; for it
is part of the nature of these completely contrary methods that no attempt
to combine them and to apply the result to the field of natural law could
be wholly successful. The effect was to bring the rationalist and the
empiricist within him into conflict, though he was himself unaware of it.
The rationalist believed in his own capacity to find a way, by the light of
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reason, to those natural and basic principles of law to which man is
subject in moral, legal and political matters. But the empiricist found
himself faced at the outset with a problem — that of the origin of natural
law — which, though recognisable by reason, could not be solved by
reason alone. Precisely because it seemed to him to be in contradiction
with the experience of history, he rejected both the theory of Grotius,
according to which law arises from the social instinct, and the contrary
theory of Hobbes, which derived all human society from the instinct of
self-preservation. He therefore refused to assume any contract of society,
because this assumption is incapable of historical proof, but postulated
instead a natural state of helplessness, or ‘imbecillitas’, which exists at all
times and in all places and forces individuals into society. In this secular-
ised form the Lutheran doctrine of the origin of the State as a divinely
instituted expedient clearly found an echo in the mind of Pufendorf. For
him, too, law is basically a product of necessity, the expression, not of
anything divine, but of something specifically human. This raised the
problem which preoccupied Pufendorf throughout his life, of the con-
nection between natural law and the real State as it existed in history. It
is true that he did not, like Hobbes, reach a position in which he saw the
power of the State and the commands of nature as synonyms ; but he never-
theless went near enough to this view — again in contrast with Grotius —
to see natural law, realised in the State, as the sole source of positive law.
His system is a synthesis of earlier views, for Pufendorf too, as a
political thinker, was a disciple of Bodin and still more of Hobbes. He
too conceived of the State after the fashion of his century, as the repository
of unlimited sovereignty, free from any ecclesiastical or political authority
and equal in rights with all other States. This is shown most clearly in his
well-known attitude to the special constitutional problem of Germany,
the relationship between the Empire and the principalities.
Deeply rooted in German history there lay an inevitable conflict
between the Germans’ sense of being one people and the new conception
of the State, which they encountered in the political reality of the century.
In France, the absolute authority of the king, with its religious basis, had
long been fused with the nation’s need for unity; even in England, the
interest of the nation and the prerogative of the ruler were never in
fundamental conflict with each other, despite the bitterness with which
the extent and limits of the royal power were contested. In Germany, on
the other hand, the new conception of sovereignty benefited only the
principalities and inevitably tended, as it took deeper hold, to empty the
concept of the Empire of all content. The growing contrast between the
raison d'etat of the autonomous princely States and the venerable edifice
of the Empire which embraced them all, between a princely and an
Imperio-monarchic interpretation of the traditional constitution of the
Empire, increased the need, in theory and in practice, for a new and
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clearly formulated definition of the relationship between the Empire and
its loose components. Pufendorf was among those who tackled this
topical problem. Preceding his comprehensive system of natural law, he
published an analysis and critique of the Imperial constitution which
became his most popular work and still ranks among the classic works of
German political literature.
There were, of course, earlier important and widely read treatises on the
idea and constitution of the Empire, and of these Pufendorf made
extensive use ; but they were products of the political struggle and thus, in
the widest sense, partisan. Pufendorf, on the other hand, claimed to have
produced something much more modern and, indeed, revolutionary : he
aimed at a scientific approach, involving, therefore, a reasoned critique
of the existing State. He may have realised the danger of such an enter-
prise, for he gave his work the colourless title of De Statu Imperii
Germanici and published it under the pseudonym of an Italian traveller,
Severinus de Monzambano. The originality of this brief work lay, not in
the much-quoted description of the Empire as a constitutional ‘monster’,
but rather in its new and striking independence of all the political
authorities of the time. He defended neither the special interests of the
princes and Estates nor those of the Habsburg Emperors. His ratio status
was exclusively that of the Empire, but of an Empire which — because of
its lack of any single sovereignty — in Pufendorf’s opinion was an inter-
national federation rather than a single State. However much the
politician in him may have regretted it, the historian could not fail to see
how historical development had led the Empire permanently away from
the single-State structure, and that something durable could develop only
within the framework of the new territorial principalities. For that
reason, he saw the Empire as a federation of States, and this view for long
exercised a decisive influence upon German constitutional thought.
This sober assessment of the irrevocable facts of historical reality was
connected with a further characteristic of Pufendorf’s political thought:
his bourgeois attitude to the problems of the political world. He was
already thinking as a matter of course in terms of the modern antithesis
between ‘ruler’ and ‘subject’. His detailed proposals for reform breathe
the same bourgeois spirit. Many of his demands — a common currency,
abolition of customs and trade barriers — particularly affected the
German burghers, their legal status and economic interests. In this
respect, Pufendorf may be classed among the forerunners of the urban
civilisation of the eighteenth century, which in Germany developed under
the protection of, and to some extent in alliance with, enlightened
despotism. His name is therefore indissolubly linked with this typically
German version of absolutism, for which, it has been said, his theory was
‘made to measure’. The extent to which he accepted the absolute princely
State should, however, not be overestimated. In Pufendorf’s view, the
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prince is less important than the State and is required to put its interests
before his own. He also clung to the idea of the transcendental character
of Christianity, though he rejected the narrowing influence of dogma.
The State certainly does not exist for the sake of the Church, but neither
has it any right of compulsion in matters of faith. Pufendorf saw the
Church as a part of that more comprehensive body, the State; but he also
conceived of every organised political community as Christian — and by
Christian he meant Protestant. A purely philosophic religio naturalis did
not provide an adequate ethical basis for the State as he conceived it.
This, in particular, distinguished him both from the French enlighten-
ment and from the dogmatic rationalism and hostility to revealed
religion of Thomasius, who none the less remains, among all later
German political thinkers, his nearest and closest disciple.
Pufendorf embodies in striking fashion the trends of political thought
which are characteristic of the century in which he lived and of his
German environment. He was significant and original enough to express
all these tendencies; but he was not a creative genius. This, indeed,
explains the extraordinary range of his influence and his reputation which,
in Germany, remained undimmed until the appearance of Christian
Thomasius and Christian Wolff. He followed the fashion of system-
building which dominated the age, but showed the practical sense and
down-to-earthness which the century demanded of its political writers.
He shared to the full its optimistic belief in the power of reason and yet
remained rooted in his Protestant traditions. The philosophic insight of
the great thinker was denied to his sober, unspeculative, sometimes rather
dry and pedantic mind, and these intellectual limitations were recognised
by no less a person than Leibniz, who said of him : ‘ vir parum jurisconsultus,
sed minime philosophus’.
These limitations are shown most clearly by a comparison with the
much more eminent author of this criticism. There can be no doubt that
Leibniz also represented his century, and in a much more important sense
than Pufendorf. But it is part of the tragedy of every genius that he can
never live in complete agreement with his time ; he looks far beyond it,
and often enough is broken by it. The first of these characteristics applies
in a quite special degree to Leibniz; the second only in so far that,
although destined to great happiness, he died in solitude and disappoint-
ment. The greater part of his work was left half finished. It was not
granted to him to set down all the results of his life’s work and present
them as a single whole, so that his political thought is interwoven into the
general content of his basic philosophic, scientific and religio-ethical
ideas. It never took the form of a precise and independent theory,
capable of giving him a well-defined place in the history of political ideas.
His thought was also in part determined and directed by the often
passionate desires of a man who was involved in the processes of political
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decision, even if only on the fringe. This too distinguishes Leibniz from
the other great thinkers of his time; for him the data of politics and
government constitute not only an immense field of observation, but he
feels compelled, within the limited possibilities available to him, actively
to intervene. Although never a statesman in the professional sense of the
term, he did not hesitate to use political weapons in the service of his
great plans, so that his life appears to be bound up with the political and
diplomatic issues of his time. He used up some of the best of his powers
in varied missions and in the drafting of memoranda for princely
employers. Indeed, nothing illustrates more clearly the narrowness and
poverty of conditions in Germany than the fact that the owner of the
richest and freest mind of the age was dependent on service to a prince
and ended his days in almost humiliating dependence, as historiographer
to the House of Guelph. Many of his political writings were therefore
written merely in order to further dynastic interests, or referred to purely
topical matters.
This is true even of the best-known of his political works, the Consilium
Aegyptiacum and the Mars Christianissimus. Therefore, these two works
are best seen as source-books of contemporary history rather than
vehicles of Leibniz’s deepest convictions. These are concerned with fields
of thought far removed from those of mere day-to-day politics, which,
indeed, they touch on only superficially — with Leibniz’s conception of a
European culture, with his plans for a comprehensive organisation of
science and with his Christian sensibilities. These lead him to three great
problems : the first is the relationship of Germany, that is, the Empire, to
the other nations and States; the second is that of the surmounting of
religious divisions ; and the third, the growing conflict between Christian
belief and the teachings of mechanistic science. It is when one measures
the attitude of Leibniz to these problems against the customary categories
of thought of his time that one becomes most acutely conscious of the
intellectual paradox which he embodied. On the one hand, he appears
almost as the prophet of coming centuries, as the far-seeing guide to
developing intellectual and political forces whose future significance was
hidden from his contemporaries, and on the other hand, his thought con-
tinues to lean on traditional concepts which his age as a whole had left
behind.
This is particularly evident in his attitude to his own political environ-
ment in Germany. For him the medieval concept of the Emperor has still
some meaning; the Empire is something infinitely greater than a mere
confederation of States ; it is a monarchic body of a Christian character.
Though he undoubtedly wished it to be primarily German, he saw it also
as a symbol of the West as a whole and of that intellectual unity of
Europe in which he so profoundly believed. For him, the ‘idea’ of the
Empire, as he wished to see it understood, signified in the political field
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the same thing as the central idea of ‘harmony’ in his philosophy — a
higher unity, within which every part retains its own special character-
istics. For this reason, and especially on account of the many types of
State power which it included, he wished to see the historic constitution
of the Empire preserved. For this reason, too, he sees in the Empire an
essential element of the European community of States, of the balance de
/’ Europe . Both the Empire and Europe, in his view, would be most
seriously threatened if the whole Continent came to be ruled by the French
monarchy, and the changes in the power relationships of his day seemed
to him to bring this within the range of possibility.
Here we find the roots of his ‘Imperial patriotism’, which of necessity
was directed against France and her expansionist foreign policy; but to
him Europe, and beyond Europe the unity of the whole world, were
more important than the Empire. From the time of his meeting with
Peter the Great, Russia seemed to him to offer a new and promising field
for the European spirit. At the same time he looked towards distant
China as a possible participant in a world-wide civilisation based on
European and Christian concepts. The national and the universal trends
of his thought — German patriotic feeling, together with a consciousness
of Europe as a whole — are constantly merging. Just as his plans for an
Academy embraced both the old Empire and the whole of the civilised
world, so his patriotic aims culminated in the search for an essentially
universal civilisation, so that even at the end of a life full of disappoint-
ments he was still able to write: ‘I consider Heaven my mother country,
and all right-thinking men my fellow-citizens.’ But this cultural citizen-
ship of the world, with its philosophic guiding-star of universal harmony,
was not limited to the sphere of mind. Despite its unmistakably ration-
alist colouring, it has a Christian background, against which it must be
seen.
Outwardly, Leibniz always remained a Lutheran Protestant, but his
Christianity had a universal content, capable of bursting the bonds of any
dogma; and no country was so well suited as Germany, with its sharp
religious divisions, to bring home to him the tragic significance of the
division of Christendom. He saw this division both as a national mis-
fortune for Germany and beyond that as an obstacle to religious and
political peace in Europe. He devoted years of his life to active collabora-
tion in the ‘irenic’ attempts at the reunion of Christendom, as a step on
the road to his own supreme goal, a Christian community of all peoples,
ruled by reason. It was in the course of this effort that he crossed swords
with Bossuet in a remarkable correspondence — he, the greatest representa-
tive of the ‘new science’ and of Protestant Germany, pitting himself
against the greatest intellectual exponent of the Catholic monarchy of
Louis XIV. The ‘irenic’ campaign failed, as it was bound to fail, in its
clash with the facts of a political reality in which State and Church were
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still interlinked and with the immovable dogmatic basis of post-Tridentine
Catholicism . 1
While Leibniz was striving vainly to heal the old breach between the
rival religions, he saw a new and dangerously wide breach opening at the
feet of both religious communities — the breach between Christianity and
modern science. His recognition of this fact and his assessment of its
future significance prove his great percipience. Leibniz accepted in full
the rationalist optimism of his time, and his belief in the intellectual and
moral power of scientific knowledge never left him, nor did his conviction
that he could make the human race happier and better by his combined
philosophic and scientific endeavours. In this sense, Leibniz always
belonged to the ‘enlightenment’; but at the same time he foresaw the
distant consequences of a trend of which he knew himself to be one of
the agents, and which owed to him something of its driving force. He
recognised the dangers that lay hidden in the intellectual presumption
of rationalism, and he tried to warn its adepts that they ‘ were preparing
everything for the general revolution with which Europe is threatened’.
These astonishing words were written at the turn of the century, in a
polemic against John Locke. It was not chance that led him to produce
this work in the second half of his life, for it embraced that significant
transition period which we have come to call, after the title of a famous
book, La crise de la conscience Europeenne. It included the last two
decades of the old century and the first of the new and was a period of
preparation for sudden change in every field of intellectual life, a period
in which the current of political ideas was noticeably quickened.
The political views discussed in this chapter differ from each other in
important respects, and they emerged from widely differing philosophic,
personal and national circumstances. And yet they possess one striking,
though perhaps superficial, common characteristic: they all help to
justify the existence of a powerful State. Even those authors who avoided
all historical and theological argument and relied only upon natural law
saw in natural law the rational justification of a strong monarchy, in
which, for the seventeeth-century mind, both the legality and the utility
of absolute power were most impressively demonstrated. Such is the
nature of the dialectic of natural law, however, that it inevitably contained
from its very beginnings all that was required to justify a diametrically
opposite political concept, provided only that the ‘natural’ rights of the
individual were set above the association into which he was merged and
that one moved forward to the claim that the State rests on and is sus-
tained, not by the sovereignty of the princes, but by that of the people.
This doctrine had lain for long in the intellectual arsenal of mankind. It
was conceived in the Middle Ages, but became a political weapon only
during the religious wars of the sixteenth century. It was not the percep-
1 Cp. below, ch. vi, pp. 145-6.
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tive mind of the philosophers, but the ethical and religious demands of the
Calvinists that turned it against a hostile State and filled it with the
passion of religious certainty. It was developed into a comprehensive
doctrine of State and society by a German Calvinist, Johannes Althusius,
at the beginning of the century.
Even this doctrine, however, could not dispense with the most import-
ant methodological principle of the thought of the age, the contract
theory; this theory ensures to the individual a number of rights, above all
religious rights, felt by every individual to be his own inborn possession,
which can be neither lost nor surrendered. A whole series of concrete and
pregnant political demands found a characteristic justification in this
theory — demands which, as in the England of the Great Rebellion, almost
led to a destruction of the State itself. And, indeed, the bogy of anarchy,
which seemed to raise its head along with the principle of the sovereignty
of the people, became one of the most powerful arguments of the
defenders of monarchical absolutism, which reached its peak, in theory
and practice, between 1660 and 1685. Sovereignty of the people remained,
none the less, the most powerful and dominant political concept of the time.
It was not defeated, but only held in check by conditions unfavourable to
its development, and a change in these conditions was enough to revive it.
This change was introduced by two events which happened in the same
year, though there was no causal connection between them. All they had
in common was the fact that, in different ways, they threatened the right
of large sections of the people to worship in their own way. One was the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV, the other the accession
of James II in England. The persecution of the Huguenots, the final and
belated action of the Counter-Reformation, awakened the intellectual
resistance of world-Protestantism to the French monarchy, and the
French Calvinists took the ideological offensive against absolutism from
their new base in Holland. In England, the policy of James II had the
effect on a Protestant nation of a call to battle and brought the doctrine
of the Divine Right of kings face to face with a challenge which it was not
equipped to meet. In both cases, there arose demands for political and for
religious freedom which combined to give revolutionary power to the
principle of the sovereignty of the people. While, however, in France the
consequences of the persecution of the Huguenots were not seen until
much later and therefore did not visibly weaken French absolutism, the
consequences of the change of ruler in England were immediate and
revolutionary; for in the Glorious Revolution a monarchy was bom
which no longer rested on divine ordination and the right of succession,
but owed the throne to the call of parliament, despite all the efforts made
to hide this fact. This was not the least of the causes of the widespread
influence in Europe of the revolution settlement. It was not only the final
and successful solution of an almost secular constitutional struggle, not
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only the starting-point of a general shift in the balance of power; it was
also a milestone in the history of political ideas, and would have been
even if it had not found in John Locke an influential interpreter, who
presented it to all Europe as a model of the rational organisation of the
State.
There have been few occasions in history on which a major political
event and its interpretation by a contemporary thinker have so happily co-
incided with and complemented each other as did the Glorious Revolution
and Locke’s Treatises of Civil Government. Yet the student would be wise
to beware of seeing in Locke’s essay a mere piece d’ occasion, written with
the conscious intention of justifying for party purposes the revolution of
1688. It was not merely under the influence of the revolution that Locke’s
basic political ideas were formed. They had been ripening in his mind
before he wrote the Treatises. Moreover, the English Whig politicians
had not been dependent on his arguments, for the intellectual weapon
which they needed and used had long been available in the extensive
polemical literature which was born of the English constitutional conflict.
It is also too often forgotten that Locke’s theory is by no means in com-
plete conformity with the traditional Whig standpoint. One of the best-
known arguments of the ‘Revolution- Whigs’ was ‘the original contract
between king and people’, which — in their view — James II had broken.
In Locke’s theory, on the other hand, there is no ‘contract of government’
between king and people, but only a ‘social contract’ between individuals
who have joined together to form ‘civil society’. Locke’s contract is thus
pre-political ; the power of the State arises, not from a contract, but from
a revocable ‘fiduciary power’ which the people entrusts to the rulers.
Locke remains nevertheless in a deeper sense what he was to his
contemporaries and to posterity, the philosophical apologist of the
constitutional principles of the Whigs. For the justification which he
offered for these principles was not only their suitability to the material
and political needs of the time, but also their conformity with the eternally
valid commands of pure reason. In so doing, he gave to the revolution
settlement, in his own clear, readable and unassuming prose, an interpre-
tation admirably adapted to the temper of the times. His astounding
influence, first upon his contemporaries and then upon the whole
eighteenth century, rests on the combination of these two qualities. For
his political philosophy was certainly not wholly new, but rather the fruit
of prolonged and wide reading. The raw materials from which he con-
structed his system are to be found in the writings of numerous fore-
runners and contemporaries. Indeed, many of his basic views had been
more carefully considered or more brilliantly presented by others. But, by
reformulating them with greater clarity and moderation and linking them
with an attractive picture of man in the state of nature, he fashioned a
theory which incorporated the whole spirit of the changing order of things
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in political life. Locke’s theory, indeed, mirrored to perfection the
character of an age in which the passion of the constitutional conflict had
given way to the sober desire for a settlement, an age whose temperate
piety found the religious passion of Milton as uncongenial as the so-called
‘atheism’ of Hobbes, and which saw in ‘government by consent’ the best
guarantee of the secure and peaceful enjoyment of private property.
The teachings of Locke, and in particular his contradictions, become
self-explanatory, or at least lose some of their contradictions, if they are
measured against the political reality of which Locke never lost sight when
he was writing his Treatises. It is true that he clothed his political
theories in general philosophic concepts, but these cannot hide the
historic features of the English constitution of the seventeenth century.
Behind the fiction of a mass of exactly similar individuals equipped with
natural rights there lies the hidden reality of Locke’s compatriots in
England, and what he describes, in the language of the political philosophy
of his time, is the machinery and the working of the English constitution,
as he knew it from his own observation and as it was then understood.
Even his much-discussed theory of the separation of powers conveys in
fact an accurate general picture of the actual distribution of authority in
England between the highest organs of the State. Where the picture
appears to be wrong, it has merely been overtaken by later constitutional
developments; in its own time it was very close to reality. The fact that
the theory laid its emphasis on the separation of powers and overlooked
the possible links between the powers is due to the conditions of a period
in which the ever-wakeful mistrust of the Crown seemed to point to the
need for the greatest possible degree of separation between legislative and
executive. And if, in his mind, the judicial and administrative powers
merge into one — the executive — when set against the legislature, that fact
too merely reflects the greater strength of the legislature, as embodied in
parliament.
It may at first sight seem confusing that Locke should first have made
parliament the ‘supreme power’ and then limited its authority by the
creation of another ‘supreme power’, the people; but this is in fact no
more than the typical contemporary presentation of the distinction
between ‘legal’ and ‘political’ sovereignty. Locke avoided the word
‘sovereignty’ with something akin to fear, because it seemed to him to
have been discredited by Hobbes, but he knew what it meant and could be
made to mean. The ‘ supreme power ’ of the legislature is simply the ‘ legal
sovereignty’ of parliament, in the form into which it had developed in the
seventeenth century and in which it had been confirmed by the Glorious
Revolution. In the same way, the ‘ supreme power’ of the people is simply
the ‘political sovereignty’, to which, in the last resort, the legislature is
answerable. But the power of the people does not manifest itself in
normal circumstances; it affirms its existence by the act of creating the
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State and does not act again, except when there is no legitimate political
authority. In the intervening periods it remains passive, and the legisla-
ture is the ‘supreme power’. The only right which Locke accords to the
people as a political society is a qualified right of revolt, when the formerly
legitimate authority has broken its trust; for he was by no means a
democrat. Like the Whigs whose views he shared, he accepted in its
entirety the traditional constitution, which — in their unshakeable view —
had simply been restored by the Glorious Revolution.
What the eighteenth century saw in the works of Locke was, then, the
English constitution, an essentially complete and therefore inviolable
structure: this is the reason for the almost canonical status which later
generations accorded to him. It is equally the source of the profound
misunderstandings to which his ideas gave cause. They were still seen as
the last word in political wisdom when the circumstances from which they
had arisen had long since changed. The myth of the English constitution,
which he so effectively helped to create, trailed like a cloud of glory
behind him and made him the spiritual father of the West European
enlightenment and of its far-reaching ideological and political conse-
quences. In England itself, on the other hand, he was seen as the eloquent
defender of stability and of tradition — which explains why clearly
discernible threads of influence run from him to Rousseau as well as to
Burke.
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CHAPTER VI
CHURCH AND STATE
F or both Catholics and Protestants, the Peace of Westphalia was a
bitter disappointment. Recourse to the sword, instead of bringing
final victory as the extremists of each confession had hoped, had
merely ensured the perpetuation of religious division ; and now Catholics,
Lutherans and Calvinists had to accept co-existence in a Europe where
ideas, and the institutions embodying those ideas, were markedly
changing. But the forty years after the peace were not characterised only
by interdenominational hatred and attempts to end it ; they were also years
of tension between Church and State in several countries of western and
southern Europe. In some the conflict was a simple one between the
secular authority and one officially recognised Church; in others the
situation was complicated by the existence of religious minorities, either
Catholic, or Protestant, or both.
At first sight there might appear to be little reason in this period for an
intensification of, or even a notable alteration in, this endemic problem of
the relationship of Church and State. The mid-seventeenth century was
not shaken by an acute and general crisis, such as the Reformation. Yet
important if not spectacular changes were taking place. One of the most
significant was the tendency in several countries, Protestant as well as
Catholic, for government to become more absolute and thus less inclined
to tolerate rival or extraneous authorities, of which the churches, with
their claim to men’s deepest loyalties, were the most important. Louis XIV
put the case for the State thus : ‘ Kings are absolute seigneurs, and from
their nature have full and free disposal of all property both secular and
ecclesiastical, to use it as wise dispensers, that is to say, in accordance with
the requirements of their State’; and again, ‘those mysterious names, the
Franchises and Liberties of the Church. . .have equal reference to all the
faithful whether they be laymen or tonsured, who are all equally sons of
this common Mother; but. . .they exempt neither the one nor the other
from subjection to Sovereigns, to whom the Gospel itself precisely enjoins
that they should submit themselves ’. 1 The slow growth of a clearer idea
of sovereignty as an attribute of the State, however it was expressed, left
little room for the conception of the Church as an equal partner, and none
at all for a theocracy. For the most part the forms which the inevitable
conflicts took were the traditional ones. Opposition to clerical immunities
and ecclesiastical jurisdiction was not new, but the State was now better
1 A King's Lessons in Statecraft: Louis XIV: Letters to his Heirs, ed. J. Longnon, transl.
Herbert Wilson (London, 1924), p. 149.
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able and more inclined to make it effective. Taxes paid by the clergy were
already an important part of the revenue of most countries, yet the
churches’ untapped wealth was a standing temptation to governments
finding it hard to meet the cost of their expensive wars. Kings and their
more influential subjects had long tried to accumulate ecclesiastical
patronage and use it for their own ends, and such exploitation was ruth-
lessly extended. While raison d’etat dominated more openly the policies of
European rulers, both in foreign and domestic affairs, theories of Divine
Right, somewhat paradoxically, emphasised the unchallengeable source of
royal authority and gave the State its own independent religious sanction.
The Church thus increasingly appeared as a useful but, in the last resort,
scarcely essential prop of secular government, although its influence was
nowhere underestimated : all rulers were aware, for example, that tuning
the pulpit was one of the basic arts of politics. An inclination to treat the
Church as a department of State was not new, but its realisation was
becoming more feasible.
In some ways, however, the most important change was that in intel-
lectual climate. The tendency towards secularisation and rationalism in
thought and outlook, which certainly began in the first half of the century,
was quickened, and with it came a new scepticism, healthy in some ways,
but inevitably destructive of much in the old order. Cartesianism opened
up paths which Descartes himself never thought to tread. The empirical
approach fostered by experimental science slowly led to the questioning of
written authority, and the treatment of history became more critical. The
full results of these new methods of thinking were apparent rather after,
than before, 1688, although they were already bearing fruit. Of more
immediate importance in this period was the fact that arguments of social
convenience and material prosperity were winning a new respectability
and influence where the middle classes, with their direct interest in trade,
got more political power, as in the United Provinces and, to a lesser
degree, in England. Even in theological circles the idea that it might be
more profitable to emphasise what men could agree upon than to argue
about their differences was gaining ground, whether this took the form of
Syncretism in Germany or Latitudinarianism in England. Catholics and
Protestants alike were aware of the scandal presented by a deeply divided
Church and sought to promote plans for reunion ; Protestants in particular
began to take seriously arguments for toleration, although this was
regarded as a second best to the elimination of all religious differences.
However, neither the new claims of the State nor the growing liberalism
in thought as yet betokened any widespread falling-off in the intensity of
religious life, which under such forms as Jansenism, Quietism, Pietism
and Puritanism in all its varieties showed the vigour of Christianity in
finding new forms of expression. Indeed, it has plausibly been argued that
the full force of the Counter-Reformation was only at this time attained
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in certain countries, notably France and Austria. It was, in fact, precisely
the ambitions of the secular rulers coupled with this intensity of religious
conviction that gave much of its distinctive character to this period in the
relationship of Church and State, sandwiched as it was between the
violence of the religious wars and the exhausted somnolence of the
eighteenth century. Of course the conflict was not felt everywhere with
the same force, and in some countries constant friction was its manifesta-
tion rather than formulated antagonism.
The religious forces ranged against the secular powers varied in strength.
Lutheranism, lacking an international organisation, had always leant
heavily on secular support, but was by no means always subservient.
Since the break-up of its unity in the early seventeenth century, Calvinism
had begun to lose something of its drive, and by 1648 no longer exacted a
super-national loyalty, although it remained extremely powerful within
narrower limits. Rome still maintained widespread influence and com-
manded a large and faithful following trained to respect her authority.
Ultramontanism was steadily upheld by the international agencies of the
Jesuits and the Mendicant Orders and by the papal nuncios. In stimulating
the offensive against the Turks, the papacy remained a force of some
importance, but in other ways its political power was on the wane: the
total disregard of the pope in all the main peace treaties from Westphalia
onwards demonstrates both its lost prestige and the growing secularisation
of European life. Every papal election and every nomination of new
cardinals underlined the vulnerability of the Curia to pressure from the
great powers of France, Spain and Austria. Yet under an able or vigorous
pope Rome was still very much a force to be reckoned with, for Protestant
as well as Catholic powers. For different reasons neither Innocent X
(1644-55) nor Alexander VTI (1655-67) was impressive, but Clement IX
(1667-9) and Clement X (1670-6) won more general respect through their
attempt to uphold moderation and justice. Innocent XI (1676-89), how-
ever, was a pope in the great tradition in spite of certain weaknesses, and
his quiet obstinacy was fully a match for all Louis XIV’s diplomacy and
violence, while his character excited general admiration throughout
Europe.
In Germany the history of Church and State in this period is in many
ways a commentary on the Treaty of Osnabriick, concluded on 24 October
1648 between the Emperor Ferdinand III and the Swedes and their
respective allies, and essentially, in its main religious provisions, an
amplification rather than a revision of the Peace of Augsburg (1555).
Under its terms, Calvinists were at last, after years of controversy, given
the same privileges as adherents of the Augsburg Confession, and Calvinist
territorial lords held to enjoy the same right as Catholics and Lutherans to
decide the religion of their lands (the jus reformandi). Special plans were
made to ensure the continuation of an established religion when a ruler
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changed his faith, as had happened, for example, when in 1613 John
Sigismund of Brandenburg abandoned Lutheranism for Calvinism.
Although the terms of the treaty were ambiguous, there were also pro-
visions to permit some practical toleration for those living under a ruler of
different faith, but except for certain specified areas these did not apply to
any Habsburg dominions. Whatever freedom of worship, public or private,
had existed in 1624 was (except in the diocese of Hildesheim) to be per-
petuated, until reunion could be achieved. Those who in 1624 had not
been allowed any free exercise of religion, unless it were the same as the
ruler’s, were now granted the right of private worship and of educating
their children in their own faith; nor were such persons to be subject to
any civil disability nor denied Christian burial. Another clause, however,
seemed to permit the forced emigration of religious dissentients. How
far these provisions were really effective in practice it is hard to say, but
in theory a fairly liberal settlement had been achieved, which compared
favourably with the situation in many other parts of Europe.
Particularly important was the ruling on ecclesiastical territories and
reservations, so hotly disputed during the Thirty Years War. In the lengthy
negotiations on this point the main difficulty had been to fix the year which
should be decisive in settling the possession of the various lands.
1 January 1624 was at last chosen (although it did not apply to the
Emperor’s hereditary lands), a date favouring the Protestants since it
ignored the results of the Edict of Restitution of 1629 1 and some notable
military acquisitions of the Catholics, but left in Catholic hands many
churches coveted by their rivals. Accordingly, whichever confession had
held a bishopric, religious foundation or ecclesiastical estate on this date
was to keep it, unless it was specifically disposed of in the treaty, until
reunion should take place. Permanency was sought for this ruling by the
decision that if the occupant of an ecclesiastical office changed his religion,
his tenure would end at once; moreover, if a cathedral chapter were
divided in religion, the same proportion of Catholics and Protestants was
henceforth to be kept. Thus further secularisations were prevented, and
the main material inducement to conversion to Protestantism was taken
away. As a result, Protestantism remained strong in the north; but in the
south Catholicism was dominant, the duchy of Wurttemberg and the
Palatinate constituting the only large Protestant areas there.
That Innocent X condemned the settlement in his brief Zelo Domus Dei
of November 1648 was in practice meaningless, since German Catholics
had no alternative but to accept the peace. Neither side, of course, was
wholly satisfied, and in some areas the treaty provisions proved difficult to
implement : in Wurttemberg, for example, where after 1634 the monasteries
had been restored, the Catholics gave up their newly acquired possessions
with slow reluctance. That the Protestant position and the peace in general
1 For this, see vol. rv, ch. xi.
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was in danger was a recurrent fear excited both by the vigour of Catholic
missionary activity and the political power of the Habsburgs, and often
fanned by France’s readiness to intervene in German affairs as the
4 Protector ’ of the 4 German Liberties The ineffectual corpus evangelicorum
set up by Protestant members of the Diet in 1653 and the League of the
Rhine of 1658, with Catholic and Protestant adherents, both sought,
among other and more specifically political aims, to uphold the religious
provisions of the Osnabriick treaty. But in spite of mutual distrust, the
letter of the peace was not substantially violated, however often its spirit
was ignored.
Within the German States the current problems of Church and State
differed widely. A strong belief that religious uniformity was a pre-
requisite of civil unity continued to dominate the Catholic rulers, although
the provisions of the 1648 treaty and, especially within the Habsburg
dominions, the exigencies of politics combined to prevent complete
re-Catholicisation. In areas where the war had caused most disturbance,
a thorough ecclesiastical reorganisation was sometimes necessary, such as
that of the Calvinist or Reformed Church in the Rhine Palatinate on the
return of the Elector Charles Louis in 1649. The consistory was reinstated
the same year, but some ambiguity in the peace terms led to a constant
dispute as to whether Calvinism was to be regarded as the official religion
or not, while the Elector’s tolerant outlook and interest in reunion
deprived the Reformed Church of whole-hearted princely support. In
Hesse-Cassel, serious difficulties arose between the Calvinist Landgrave
William VI and the commission set up to decide on church order, and the
plan finally made law in 1657 was carried in spite of strong opposition
from the Reformed pastors. The Great Elector of Brandenburg, himself a
Calvinist, found it hard to keep the peace between the Lutherans (the
overwhelming majority of his subjects) and his co-religionists in Branden-
burg and Prussia. His own indifference to theological disputes was not
shared by the Lutheran ministers, and serious trouble flared up in 1662,
when a conference of Lutheran and Calvinist representatives, summoned
to Berlin to discuss reunion, failed to reach agreement. The practice of
abusing opponents from the pulpit by name grew so scandalous that an
edict of 1664 forbade such personal attacks, prohibited public criticism of
other confessions, and required ministers to submit to its terms in writing
or suffer ejection. Resistance came from a vigorous minority of Lutherans
which included Paul Gerhardt, a notable preacher and hymn-writer;
Frederick William did his best to get him reinstated, but he resigned again
in 1666 and went to Saxony, where his avowal, ‘I cannot regard the
Calvinists as Christians ’, was more in line with official policy. Support for
the recalcitrants came from the Brandenburg diet and the town of Berlin.
In the duchy of Prussia, where Lutheran orthodoxy was particularly
strong, Calvinism was only slowly tolerated at all and Calvinists were
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excluded from most important offices. In Cleves, on the other hand, the
Great Elector was forced to protect Lutherans from the Calvinist majority.
Although opposed to Catholicism, Frederick William was generally
tolerant of the Catholic minorities in his lands, as he was also of Socinians
and Mennonites. A desire to increase the population and prosperity of his
dominions was probably as potent a cause of his toleration edicts of 1662
and 1664 as religious and intellectual conviction, but he was genuinely
interested in reunion and tried, though unsuccessfully, to promote it in his
own territories. His approach to ecclesiastical problems was predomin-
antly authoritarian and secular, and he considered himself, within his
realms, the supreme bishop.
If the political leadership of Protestant Germany had to some degree
now passed to Brandenburg, Saxony (whose Elector had protested
vigorously against the admission of Calvinists to equality in the Empire
in 1648) stood for Lutheran orthodoxy, and the Saxon University of
Wittenberg as the fount of uncorrupted Lutheran truth. ‘If things are to
go on according to the intentions of Electoral Saxony ... we shall have a
new papacy and a new religion’, was the comment in 1650 of the mild
theologian George Calixtus of the liberal Brunswick University of
Helmstedt, where Syncretist ideas were strong. Very different was the
climate of opinion in Hanover, whose ruler, Duke John Frederick, had
been converted to Catholicism in 1651. He was not able to give his
co-religionists much relief, but he drew round himself excellent men of all
confessions, including the great Leibniz. The wife of his successor Ernest
Augustus, Sophia, the daughter of the unfortunate Elector Frederick V
of the Palatinate, continued to encourage projects for reunion, and her
influence helped to make Hanover the home of calm and reasonable
discussion.
Throughout this period great families continued to monopolise both
Catholic and Protestant bishoprics and ecclesiastical properties. Thus the
Bavarian Wittelsbachs dominated a group of North German bishoprics,
members of the Habsburg family often occupied another group of sees,
and Protestant dynasties had an even firmer hold in the secularised
bishoprics, mostly in North Germany. The requirement of a certain social
rank, even if not always noble blood, for the holding of many prebends in
German cathedrals and collegiate churches also strengthened the control
of the aristocracy over both the Catholic and the Protestant churches.
But high birth and political entanglement did not necessarily make for
inefficiency: two of the most notable administrators of this period were
Christopher Bernard von Galen, bishop of Munster, and Ferdinand von
Furstenberg, bishop of Paderbom.
The histories of Spain and her European possessions, of Portugal
(who gained her independence in 1640), and of Venice illustrate well the
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various difficulties concerning the relations of Church and State which
might arise even when both rulers and people were firmly Catholic, the
problem of religious minorities absent, and new ideas made comparatively
little impact. In Spain, Church and State were so closely connected that
the Spanish Church is sometimes described as a State-Church, and the
Spanish State as a Church-State; that the Inquisition was under royal and
not papal control typifies this relationship. But the coincidence of
interests may easily be exaggerated. It was agreed by all discerning critics
that in Spain there were too many priests and monks, the Church owned
too much property (perhaps about a fifth of all the land), and the amount
it paid in taxation was disproportionate to its wealth, although it con-
tributed much to the government and the Crown was generally in debt to
the funds of the Inquisition. Nor was the state of the Church satisfactory.
Most of the country priests were poor and many of them very ignorant,
since the post-Tridentine movement for the foundation of seminaries had
made little advance in Spain. The episcopate mainly consisted of hard-
working and serious-minded men, without that aristocratic predominance
so marked in contemporary France and Germany; but there was an
unhealthy contrast between rich sees, such as Seville and Valencia, and
poorer ones like Lugo and Oviedo. It is noteworthy that, unlike the
kings of France, Spanish kings had comparatively little patronage outside
the Indies, and some even of what they exercised came to them only by
papal grant. As in other countries, ecclesiastical administration in all its
forms provided profitable openings for the nobility and hidalgos, and
abuses were probably as much enjoyed as they were condemned.
It is therefore not surprising that, in spite of the fervour of Spanish
Catholicism, Philip IV sought in some ways to limit the wealth and
powers of the Church. He inaugurated, partly with papal support, a
movement for the reform of the clergy and the religious orders, forbade
any further increase of property in mortmain, and extended certain taxes
to the clergy. But the forces against any fundamental reform were too
powerful for much success to be achieved, and Philip himself (who came
under the strong influence of Sor Maria de Agreda in 1643) did not pursue
it wholeheartedly. During the minority of Charles II and later under his
pathetic personal rule little further was done, and indeed the rise to
political power of the Queen’s confessor, the Austrian Jesuit, Father
Nithard, from 1665 to 1669, marked the resurgence of clerical domination
in the highest counsels of the land. But in 1677 reform of the religious
orders was again debated, and the founding of new religious houses made
more difficult. The powers of the Inquisition were also slightly curtailed,
in spite of an auto de fe in 1680 to celebrate the marriage of Charles II
with Marie Louise of France, when a hundred and eighteen persons were
sentenced and some later burnt; in 1677 Charles declared excommunica-
tion illegal in matters concerning laymen or temporal possessions only,
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and so sought to curb the Inquisition’s excessive jurisdictional powers.
But such measures did not portend any real diminution of Catholic zeal in
Spain. On the contrary the missionary work that was such an important
consequence of the Counter-Reformation went steadily forward, and
Jesuit activities were particularly successful.
In the Spanish Netherlands Jansenist doctrines (of which more will be
said later) spread widely, especially under the influence of Louvain
University, and gave rise to peculiar difficulties between Church and
State, especially over what authority should promulgate papal orders,
whether a Bull had any validity unless endorsed by a royal placet, and the
extent of Rome’s jurisdiction in the country. The Spanish authorities
clashed with the papacy also in Naples and Milan, primarily over juris-
diction, rights of asylum, and the disposal of lands of suppressed religious
houses, the last a matter of contention as well between Rome and the
republics of Venice and Genoa. But for all the talk of interdict and other
ecclesiastical penalties, the proximity of Spanish territory to the Papal
States was a powerful deterrent to decisive action, and friction rather than
open conflict characterised everywhere the relations of Spanish-controlled
governments with the papacy.
The Portuguese Church in the earlier part of this period was in a
peculiar sense the victim of politics. King John of Braganza, who was
leading Portugal’s struggle for independence from Spain, had in 1645 sent
the Prior of Sodofeita to Rome to promote his claim to nominate bishops,
both for reasons of prestige and to consolidate his hold on the country.
For the pope to have agreed to this demand, thus acknowledging John’s
legitimacy as a ruler, would have been perilous in view of Spain’s still
formidable strength, and Innocent X decided instead to provide bishops
to the vacant sees of Guarda, Miranda and Viseu, motu proprio. With the
support of France, John (who had threatened to call a national council)
then appointed bishops to three other sees without papal confirmation
and so shut the door on compromise. While a bitter struggle between the
Spanish and French factions took place at Rome over his recognition, the
state of the Portuguese Church grew steadily worse. By 1649 there was
only one bishop of undoubted validity in the country. The deadlock per-
sisted until, in 1668, peace with Spain made it possible for the vacant sees
to be canonically filled, the king’s right of nomination for the future
settled, some order re-established in the Church, and the threat of schism
ended. Another crisis arose when the incompetent Afonso VI was
deposed in 1667 and succeeded by his brother Pedro II. 1 Afonso’s wife,
Marie Fran^oise of Savoy, who was under French influence, applied, not
to Rome, but to Lisbon, for an annulment so that she could marry Pedro ;
moreover, the dispensation for her to marry her former husband’s
brother was obtained, with very doubtful legality, from her uncle the
1 See below, ch. xvi, p. 396.
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Cardinal Vendome while he was in France, and not from the pope.
Louis XIV, who relied on her to maintain French interests in Portugal,
did all in his power to prevent Rome’s intervention ; but as a result of the
queen’s scruples Clement IX finally submitted the question to a Congrega-
tion which confirmed the new marriage. Not until this matter had been
settled could Portugal and Rome resume full diplomatic relations. In the
latter part of the century there was comparatively little friction.
Difficulties between Venice and the papacy were endemic throughout
the period. Papal support for the Venetians in their fight against the
Turks led to generous grants from ecclesiastical property and clerical
taxes for the expenses of war, for example in 1653, 1657, 1660 and 1667;
but constant trouble occurred over jurisdiction, nomination to bishoprics,
the curbing of the Inquisition, and (till 1657 when they were readmitted) the
banishment of the Jesuits. Venice’s adherence to the Holy League in 1684 1
was to some extent a triumph for Innocent XI’s crusading policy against
the Turks, but in ecclesiastical matters the Venetians were determined to
maintain their own traditions of independence and tension continued.
France was the scene of varied and bitter conflicts between Church and
State. This is scarcely surprising. In the first place, Louis XIV was by far
the most ambitious ruler of his time, and his assumption of an overriding
authority, based on Divine Right, historical tradition and raison d'etat came
into conflict at many points with the papacy; it was a conflict, moreover,
with elements in it of an ecclesiastical civil war, since the king could
depend on Gallican sections in the French Church to support his cause
against Rome. Secondly, Louis’s respect for orthodoxy and preference
for uniformity accorded ill both with the well-established toleration of his
Protestant, and the Jansenism of some of his Catholic, subjects. Thirdly,
the remarkable vigour and variety of religious life in France at this
period, and the no less remarkable devotion which so many Frenchmen of
all classes and creeds felt towards their king, caused many to face a clash
of loyalties in the most acute form. Neither papal nor royal policy was
consistent. Rome’s attitude to Jansenism, for example, differed con-
siderably under Innocent X and Innocent XI; the king’s desire for
uniformity forced him into both inviting and repelling papal interference
in the religious affairs of France.
The Gallican tradition of the French Church conditioned to a greater
or lesser degree all the ecclesiastical controversies of the reign. But the
Gallican standpoint cannot easily be summarised. Neither the word
‘Gallicanism’ nor any precisely defined theory to deserve that name
existed in 1648, nor, in spite of the Four Articles of 1682, even by 1688.
Contemporaries, however, spoke of the ‘Gallican Church’ and its
‘ Liberties ’ and saw these as contrasted with papal pretensions and ultra-
montane claims, both suspect to Frenchmen who feared the hand of
1 See below, ch. xtx, p. 471 ; ch. xx, p. 498.
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Spain behind them. Yet for the king of France, the Faculty of Theology
at Paris, the Parlements and the French bishops, the import of these
phrases was not the same. Royal Gallicanism was concerned with the
maintenance of the Concordat of Bologna of 1516 and other agreements,
and, as circumstances demanded, with further claims to control the
French Church based on the proud boast that the kings of France held
their authority direct from God without any intermediaries and had at
their disposal all property both secular and ecclesiastical. The Faculty of
Theology at Paris sought to uphold various maxims, including the defence
of the authority of councils against papal superiority, and of the divine
institution of bishops against the claim that the pope was episcopus
universalis, and the Church an absolute monarchy under him, from whom
all other authority was merely delegated. Far less forceful was the
Gallicanism of the bishops who, relying on the king for support against
either papal or secular encroachment, were frequently sacrificed to the
dictates of political exigency. The Parlements in their turn were anxious
to secure the king’s independence in temporal matters and to rebut any
suggestion that the Gallican liberties were founded on any privilege,
revocable by the pope, or on any dispensation or mere custom. Relying
on the evidence of early ecclesiastical history, they used their learning to
challenge later papal claims and made much of the project that the king
should exercise over the Church the same powers that Constantine and
particularly Charlemagne had once enjoyed. The five-yearly meetings of
the General Assembly of the Clergy, at which the valuable dons gratuits
were voted to the Crown, provided regular and widely publicised
occasions for the propagation of these points of view.
Not all Frenchmen, however, were Gallican in their sympathies.
Indeed some groups, such as the Jesuits and the Mendicant Orders, held
strongly ultramontane opinions, upholding the pope as the source of all
authority in the Church, belittling the importance of bishops and councils,
and stressing papal infallibility in controversies of the faith. But while the
Friars were of little significance in educated circles, the Jesuits, though
widely distrusted for their moral theology, enjoyed a considerable reputa-
tion, directing through the confessional the spiritual life of many
Frenchmen including the king, and in their schools training boys from the
leading French families. Ultramontane ideas were only slightly less
strong in the various centres for spiritual reform where the devots exerted
their powerful influence. Fervently religious, scrupulously correct in their
Catholicism, obedient to the dictates of their spiritual directors and
deeply imbued with a sense of their personal responsibility for advancing
the Kingdom of God on earth, the men and women to whom this term
was applied were in no sense a homogeneous body. They owed their
inspiration to such notable individualists as Pierre de Berulle (1575—
1629), the founder of the Oratory in France, St Vincent de Paul
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( c . 1580-1660), the tireless reformer with his emphasis on charity,
Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-57) who set up the seminary of Saint-Sulpice,
and St Jean Eudes (1601-80), the devout missionary whose name is
remembered for his work in promoting the better tr aining of priests and
in fostering devotion to the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. At once
practical in their attack on human problems and mystical in their
approach to God, inspired by the ideal of self-abnegation and yet aware
that a religious life spent in good works was highly fashionable, the
devots worked through various societies, the most famous of which,
founded in 1627, was the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, suppressed in
1666 by a government suspicious of its secret ways and unknown powers.
Through its influential membership, which included many laymen of high
social standing, the Compagnie intervened in all departments of life,
seeking to reform morals, promote missions, exercise charity and counter
actual heresy in the guise of Protestantism or the potential dangers of
Jansenism. With such emphasis on good works and direct action, most
devots were mistrustful of learning and of the historical and legal argu-
ments behind so much Gallican theory. Politically as well as socially they
were a powerful body, supported by the queens Anne of Austria and
Marie Therese and many others at Court. Their influence, coupled with
Mazarin’s subtle diplomacy, probably goes far to explain France’s com-
paratively peaceful relations with the papacy until Louis XIV, in reaction
against his mother, changed in 1661 the tone of French policy.
Jansenism was the occasion of the first crisis in this period in the
relations of Church and State. The movement took its name from
Cornelius Jansen who had died, as bishop of Ypres, in 1638. In Louvain
in 1640, and in Paris in 1641, was published his Augustinus. Although its
influence was considerable in the Spanish Netherlands, its effect was most
marked in France where Jansen’s lifelong friend, Jean du Vergier de
Hauranne, Abbot of Saint-Cyran, had for the last twenty years been
building up a party to promote the work of the Counter-Reformation on
foundations of disciplinary and ascetic ideas, which owed much to Berulle
and the Oratory and, theologically, to the teaching of St Augustine. By
1640 the most important elements in it included the Cistercian convent
of Port-Royal, dominated by the parlementaire family of Amauld,
and a group of friends and admirers of Saint-Cyran who approved of
his attacks on the Jesuits and their laxist theology. Jansenism was no
more than Gallicanism a coherent or unified movement. But its sym-
pathisers shared certain convictions, notably a belief in conversion, which
could only be effected by the descent of grace, and in predestination, which
condemned to perdition those upon whom grace did not fall. This
apparently harsh teaching was given the force of a moral and spiritual
revolution by the publication, in 1643, of Antoine Amauld’s widely
influential De la Frdquente Communion, criticising laxist and Jesuit ideas
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and advocating abstention from communion until the penitent’s con-
trition had been proved. In spite of the condemnation of the Augustinus
by the Bull In eminenti, published in 1643, the party continued in the next
few years to gain in strength; it could normally expect support from the
Parlement of Paris and a section in the Faculty, but the opposing forces
were strong. Not only were the Jesuits implacable and powerful foes, but
the government’s latent mistrust was to ripen into open hostility when
highly placed Jansenists and their sympathisers, including Cardinal de
Retz, the coadjutor of the Archbishop of Paris, were suspected of com-
plicity in the Fronde. 1 The movement’s threat to uniformity in the Church
and unity in the State could scarcely be ignored ; but one of the results of
governmental interference was the strengthening of those elements in
Gallicanism that were least easily controlled by the Crown, and most
likely to give rise to new friction.
A new phase began in 1649 when Nicolas Cornet, syndic of the
Faculty, put forward for censure by his colleagues certain propositions,
five of them allegedly drawn from the Augustinus ; despite appeals for
intervention by the Parlement all were condemned. Further opposition from
Gallican forces arose when the pope was asked to confirm this sentence.
Innocent X appointed a commission whose long labours were summed up
in the Bull Cum occasione of May 1653, in which the five propositions
were censured. The Jansenists retorted that although the Church, infallible
in matters of faith, had legitimately condemned them, the propositions
were not in fact to be found in the Augustinus and in such a matter of fact
the Church did not enjoy infallibility; this distinction between law {droit)
and fact {fait ) was henceforth to be of prime importance in the con-
troversy. Mazarin, fearful of Rome’s anger at the imprisonment of
de Retz, agreed to the publication of the Bull, although it was bound to
excite Gallican criticism. Only after considerable difficulties was a
Particular Assembly of the French clergy induced, in March 1654, to
declare that the Five Propositions had been censured ‘in their proper
sense, which was the sense of Jansenius’, and this decision was sanctioned
by Innocent’s brief of September. These rulings struck at the root of the
Jansenist distinction between law and fact, and the chances of any com-
promise were further weakened by a plan of Mazarin and Pierre de Marca,
archbishop of Toulouse, that a formulary against Jansenist tenets should
be signed by all ecclesiastical persons, a measure ratified in September
1656 by a General Assembly of the Clergy, which also confirmed the acts
of the Particular Assembly of 1654. Meanwhile the Jansenist party was
subject to conflicting fortunes. In January 1656 Antoine Amauld was
expelled from the Faculty, but the Lettres Provinciates of Blaise Pascal
(one of the ‘messieurs’ living in close contact with Port-Royal), written to
defend him and the cause, were to be the stimulus of further endeavour.
1 For this, see vol. rv, ch. xvi.
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But although the formulary was not yet generally enforced and the
Jansenists enjoyed much Gallican support, government hostility to the
party was intensified even before the death of Mazarin in 1661.
Louis XIV’s accession to personal power began a period of severe
persecution. Measures were taken against Port-Royal, where resistance
to the subscription of the formulary was widespread, even while the dis-
tinction between law and fact was still condoned; after this concession
had been overruled, the nuns refused to sign again, ‘purely and simply’,
and were joined in their recalcitrance by four bishops (of Angers,
Beauvais, Alet and Pamiers). To put an end to the ridiculous position in
which a handful of women and a few bishops and theologians withstood the
dictates of pope, king and assembled national clergy, Louis in February
1665 asked Alexander VII to provide a constitution with a formulary and
to command, ex cathedra , that all ecclesiastics and nuns should sign it.
The king’s appeal was curiously out of character with his recent humili-
ating policy towards Rome. After a clash in 1662 between the pope’s
Corsican Guard and the French ambassador’s suite at the Palazzo
Famese (then the French embassy in Rome) Louis had refused all
attempts at apology or settlement, invaded Avignon, and threatened the
Papal States; finally, Alexander had been forced to agree in 1664 to the
shameful Treaty of Pisa, according to which a pyramid was to be erected
in Rome to mark papal acceptance of the French demand that Corsicans
must never again be employed by the Holy See.
Nevertheless the pope, consistently hostile to Jansenism, could hardly
refuse Louis’s request, though the wording of the Bull Regiminis apostolici,
of 15 February, subtly emphasised the impotence of the French king and
bishops to deal with the controversy, which was represented solely as a
matter of submission to Rome. A lit de justice was needed to induce the
Parlement of Paris to register the edict based on the Bull, with the addition
forbidding the employment of any ‘ distinction, interpretation, or restric-
tion’ in the signing of the formulary, which was to be done within three
months. The four bishops refused to accept this royal qualification, and
in asking their subordinate clergy to sign, left it open to them to make the
distinction between law and fact. The election of Cardinal Rospigliosi as
Clement DC, largely as the result of French diplomacy, facilitated the
temporary settlement of a controversy by now confused and partly
meaningless. Through the able and at times unscrupulous negotiations of
de Lionne, the four bishops were persuaded in 1668 to make their apology
to the pope and to give a ‘sincere’ signature to the formulary. At the
beginning of 1669 a medal was struck to celebrate this ‘Peace of the
Church ’, Arnauld was received by the king and the nuncio, and the nuns
of Port- Royal were readmitted to communion. For the next ten years the
Jansenist problem was quiescent; but other controversies involving
Church and State played their part in the later history of the movement.
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The conflict over the regale involved questions of a different kind. The
French Crown had long received the so-called regale temporelle, that is,
the revenues of certain sees during vacancy, but four ecclesiastical
provinces claimed exemption and the extent of the right was hotly
debated. By an edict of 1673, reinforced in 1675, Louis extended this
demand to the whole kingdom. He also put forward a new claim to the
regale spirituelle, that is, the right to nominate, while a see was vacant, to
certain convents and to benefices without cure of souls. The reason was
not financial; indeed, the revenues so received were almost always kept
for the use of the next bishop and, from 1641, the custom was to allow
two-thirds to revert to the see and a third to go towards the conversion of
the Protestants. More likely Louis was convinced that the regale temporelle
was an inalienable natural prerogative of the Crown and wanted, in
addition, administrative uniformity in his dominions; it was also clearly
advantageous to extend his patronage. His wish to apply the terms of the
Concordat fully had already been shown in its extension in 1668 to the
bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, and the question also arose in
newly acquired Artois and Roussillon.
The decrees of 1673 and 1675 were issued without the concurrence of,
but equally without any immediate protest from, Rome. Effective opposi-
tion came from two bishops, Nicolas Pavilion of Alet and Francois de
Caulet of Pamiers, both associated with Jansenism and both remarkable
as energetic reformers; in their remote Pyrenean sees both stood aloof
from the fashionable world of Versailles which exerted such a hold on
their richer episcopal brethren. The government joined issue by making
new nominations to all benefices which had fallen vacant in both dioceses
since the two bishops had occupied their sees, on the grounds that since
neither had taken the oath of allegiance now demanded from all prelates
in the areas into which the regale temporelle had been extended, their
temporalities had never been restored. Pavilion and later Caulet excom-
municated all who accepted these new appointments from the king. Both
men appealed to their respective metropolitans and also to the pope, but
in 1677 Pavilion died. Louis then made a move calculated to prolong the
conflict indefinitely. He ordered the confiscation of Caulet’s temporalities,
and Innocent XI intervened directly by sending a series of critical briefs to
the king and setting up a special congregation to consider the regale as a
whole.
Suspicions as well as incidents widened the breach. The new pope’s
high regard for Antoine Amauld and approval of the strict moral content
in Jansenist teaching and certain indiscretions of the Jansenists in France
resuscitated Louis’s fears of the movement, which in 1679 lost influential
supporters by the deaths of Madame de Longueville and de Retz and the
disgrace of the king’s minister Pomponne, a member of the Amauld
family. But the balance of forces was now altered, since the king could
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expect little help from the papacy; one of the most remarkable results of
Louis’s policy over the regale was the association of Jansenism with
ultramontane rather than Gallican forces. The revival of royal hostility
to Jansenism was manifested in a series of petty persecutions : expulsions
from Port-Royal, the prohibition against receiving new novices and the
exile of Antoine Amauld. Louis’s enmity was also directed against the
pope himself who was as firmly convinced of the danger of secular
encroachment as was Louis of papal interference. The Most Christian
King, whose policy after 1679 was dominated by the violent Colbert
faction in place of the more moderate Le Telliers, was to find Innocent a
dangerous and determined opponent.
By 1681 affairs appeared to have reached a deadlock, a situation less
serious for the pope than for Louis, who wanted a number of concessions
from Rome and was, moreover, genuinely afraid that he might be
excommunicated. But negotiation was difficult since diplomatic relations
had almost ceased, and Louis’s special envoy to Rome, Cardinal
d’Estrees, was a man more likely to exacerbate than to compose a quarrel.
There remained one possibility : to create a crisis in which the pope would
be compelled to ask the king for help in quelling Gallican criticism, by
encouraging the French clergy to show their resentment at the recent
condemnation by Rome of a book by Jean Gerbais, written at the request
of the Assembly of 1665 and praised by that of 1670. But to think that
such a situation, once manufactured, could be controlled at will was to
prove a costly delusion, and time was to show that Innocent XI, far from
seeking Louis’s help in restoring order among the clergy, was perfectly
prepared to let the French Church fall into chaos rather than abandon his
principles.
In the spring of 1681 an informal assembly of bishops considered
Gerbais’s book and Innocent’s recent briefs and advised the calling either
of a National Council or a General Assembly of the Clergy ; the second
alternative was preferred, since the first might well lead to a totally
unwanted schism. As these threats left Rome unmoved, Louis was driven
on 16 June to summon a General Assembly for October; ten days later
the king learnt that Innocent had instructed Cardinal Cibo to begin talks
with d’Estrees. Preparations for the General Assembly were entrusted to
the ambitious Archbishop Harlay, a skilful manager, while behind him
was Colbert, the implacable enemy of Rome. The Chancellor Le Tellier
and his son the Archbishop of Rheims, sincerely anxious for a settlement,
hoped that this might be achieved by the arbitration of the French clergy
between the pope and the king; possibly Bossuet’s famous sermon at the
opening of the Assembly, with its emphasis on the unity of the Church and
praise of both Gallican liberties and the authority of the Roman see, was
composed with this plan in mind. Two presidents were chosen, the
Archbishops Harlay and Le Tellier, mutually suspicious and jealous.
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Over the regale the Le Tellier party won a signal victory in persuading
Louis to agree to modify his claims to the regale spirit uelle, while the
clergy accepted the extension of the regale temporelle. Archbishop Le
Tellier wrote a letter to the pope which, it was hoped, would end the
conflict, but Innocent merely sent it on to the Congregation for the regale.
The Assembly then turned to the second part of their business, the
approval of the famous Four Articles. Political and clerical opinion was
divided on the expediency of making such a declaration; but Colbert
finally persuaded the king that, while Rome and Paris were on bad terms,
it would be valuable to redefine French doctrine as to the extent of papal
power. Yet if the immediate re-establishment of peace was really wanted,
the declaration was a strange miscalculation. The Four Articles (finally
drafted by Bossuet) asserted, first, that kings and secular princes were not
subject to any ecclesiastical power in temporal affairs; secondly, that the
decrees of the Council of Constance (concerning the superiority of a
council over the pope) were and are still valid ; thirdly, that the pope must
exercise his authority in conformity with the canons and respect the
customs of the Gallican Church ; and lastly, that although the pope had the
preponderant part in questions of faith and his decrees were binding on
the Church, his judgement was not unalterable ( irreformabile ) if it did not
meet with the assent of the Church. They had much in common with the
Six Propositions put forward by the Faculty in 1663, though the wording
of similar phrases was often subtly changed; but the real innovation was
that such ‘maxims’ were published for the first time by the bishops in the
name of the French Church. The king made them an integral part of the
theological teaching of the country by an order of March 1682.
The Assembly’s anger against the pope increased after receiving
Innocent’s brief Paternae charitati on the regale. In scathing words he
denounced the agreement with the king and castigated the French bishops
for their cowardice in surrendering the rights of the Church; in full session
the affronted prelates unleashed their wrath against Rome. Lest worse
befall, Louis decided to end the Assembly. He, at any rate, wanted peace
with the pope, just as Innocent, obsessed with the Turkish menace,
wanted peace with Louis. But the Four Articles were a serious impedi-
ment. Throughout France they excited widespread opposition; even
worse, the Faculty of Theology at Paris proved so troublesome that
Louis’s boast that all the French clergy were behind him was ignomi-
niously and publicly disproved. At Rome, divisions among the cardinals
and Innocent’s fear of provoking a schism delayed a formal condemna-
tion, but the practical consequences of Rome’s displeasure were bad
enough: Innocent refused Bulls of institution to bishoprics to all those
who had taken part in the Assembly, and since Louis would not recognise
any difference between participants and others, no sees could canonically
be filled, with the result that by 1688 thirty-five were vacant.
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Deadlock had again been reached. Innocent remained adamant and
unimpressed even by Louis’s suppression of heresy in 1685. A new phase
opened with the Affair of the Franchises on the death of the French
ambassador in Rome, the due d’Estrees, in 1687. Three years earlier
Innocent had announced that he would receive no new ambassador until
France agreed to renounce the extensive diplomatic immunities which
made the maintenance of law and order in Rome impossible. Dis-
regarding this request, Louis dispatched the brutal Marquis de Lavardin,
who ignored a sentence of excommunication passed on him and denied
that he could even fall under it when executing his master’s orders.
Accordingly, at the beginning of 1688 the Most Christian King was
secretly told that he had incurred the long-dreaded sentence of excom-
munication. 1 In France there was much talk of ignoring the Concordat
altogether and of assembling a National, or appealing to a General
Council ; the advocate-general, Talon, in the Parlement of Paris attacked
the pope for threatening to use a spiritual weapon in a temporal quarrel.
But again Louis had strong political reasons for attempting a settle-
ment. He wanted the pope’s support for his candidate, William von
Fiirstenberg, in the forthcoming election at Cologne, and hoped to sur-
render the right of diplomatic quarter in exchange for this and the
confirmation of the bishops. Negotiations again broke down. The king
then decided on violent measures, including the capture of Avignon and
the invasion of the Papal States; he launched a vast press campaign to
undermine the pope’s authority and reputation in Europe. Innocent was
accused of favouring heretics, including Jansenists and Quietists, and, in
the temporal sphere, of trying to deflect the Emperor’s arms from the
Turks to turn them against France. The French clergy were virtually cut
off from all communication with Rome, and everywhere there was talk of
schism; it was said that Harlay, still influential in the royal counsels and
having lost all chance of a cardinal’s hat, was not averse to assuming the
office of Patriarch of the Gauls, an ambition Richelieu had also enter-
tained. But although Avignon was invaded in October 1688, Louis’s
commitments to a European war and the death of Innocent in August
1689 prevented any extreme measures. Under Alexander VIII con-
ciliatory moves were made by both sides, but the brief Inter multiplices,
condemning the competence of the Assembly of the Clergy to make such a
declaration as that of 1682, showed how far the quarrel was from settle-
ment. Under Innocent XII, however, a compromise was reached. In
1692 he confirmed in their sees the French bishops who had not taken part
in the 1682 Assembly, and the participants a year later, after every mem-
ber had sent him a letter of apology. The king withdrew the order that the
Four Articles should generally be taught, although they were not specific-
1 L. von Pastor, The History of the Popes (transl. E. Graf, London, 1940), xxxn,
363-4; J. Orcibal, Louis XIV contre Innocent XI (Paris, 1949), pp. 11-13.
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ally forbidden. The conflict over the regale lapsed rather than found a
solution; but in this Louis enjoyed a practical victory, since except at
Cambrai and Lyon he kept the regale temporelle, while the regale
spirituelle was still in dispute.
Although official policy towards the Huguenots was closely connected
with other political and ecclesiastical questions, the history of French
Protestantism must be separately considered, since it involves a different
problem, that of the relations of the State with a religious minority. In
the middle of the seventeenth century the prospects for Huguenotism did
not appear unpromising, since the main provisions of the Edict of Nantes
had survived fifty years of stress and strain. But in fact the omens were
not good. The edict had been accepted by both Catholics and Protestants
not because they believed in toleration, or that a country should have two
religions, but because at that time neither had an alternative. Since 1598,
however, much had changed. The government had grown more authori-
tarian, the Counter-Reformation had burst tardily but forcefully into
French Catholicism, and Huguenotism had lost something of its original
impulse, as it changed from a fighting community led by nobles into a
party dominated by law-abiding officials and men of the middle class.
Among the more liberal Catholics and many of the Protestants there was
a nostalgia for unity. Admirable as such irenic sentiments were, however,
they blunted the sword of the Huguenots in the strife to come, as did their
growing Erastianism and the almost idolatrous praise and flattery which
many of them lavished on the king. Nevertheless, well into the personal reign
of Louis XIV the Huguenot party retained considerable social and political
significance. Turenne did not become a Catholic until 1668, Ruvigny and
Schomberg never recanted, and up to the Revocation the Protestants
included men of wealth and standing, influential in the law and other pro-
fessions and powerful as bankers ; in the south they owned much of the land.
During Mazarin’s ascendancy official policy changed little, in spite of
pressure for the reduction of Huguenot privileges from the Assemblies of
the Clergy and the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. But Louis, if as yet
only conventionally religious, was firmly convinced that more than one
confession in the State destroyed national unity and compromised
authority, while the churchmen appealed to him ‘to walk in the steps of
the great Constantine’ and repress heresy. The king’s first intention was
to maintain the terms of the Edict of Nantes, but to interpret them strictly
through special commissioners, and in addition, to refrain from showing
any favour or giving any promotion to Protestants. Louis was also well
aware that a healthy and respected Catholic Church would itself encourage
conversions; in fact the polemical skill of men like the Jansenists Amauld
and Nicole and especially Bossuet, in his Exposition de la foi catholique
(1671), was of great importance. Precision was given to this policy of
enforcement by a declaration of February 1669, which among other
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orders restricted Protestant worship to places already annexed to the
Crown in 1598 and decreed the destruction of churches built since that
date, which led, for example, to the demolition of eight in Dauphine,
sixty-four out of seventy-four in Poitou, and thirteen in La Rochelle.
The severity with which these orders were enforced fluctuated according
to the exigencies of the king’s policy; but the government still hoped that
persuasion rather than violence would be effective. Turenne had plans to
win over the more accommodating Huguenot ministers at a synod, while
discussions between Bossuet and the Huguenot Ferry took place in 1666,
and between Bossuet and Claude in 1678. Financial as well as theological
considerations were also thought to hinder conversions ; abjuration meant
an inevitable loss of livelihood for pastors and might also do so for lay-
men. The sums already set aside from government funds and voluntary
subscriptions were quite insufficient to relieve such cases. Accordingly the
Caisse des Conversions, with funds drawn from vacant abbeys and bene-
fices and a share of the revenues of sees in regale, was established in 1676,
under the control of Paul Pellisson, himself a convert ; Etienne Le Camus
had already proved the value of adequate resources by his many conver-
sions in his diocese of Grenoble. Pellisson’s methods were much criticised;
it was difficult to distinguish sincere from opportunist conversions and to
avoid the imputation of simony; the cynicism of many of the converts
could not be disguised.
A combination of circumstances finally led Louis XIV to a policy of
violent persecution which was not even to end at the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes. A desire to eradicate heresy once and for all certainly lay
behind it. But even more urgent was his need to embarrass Innocent XI;
the greater his endeavours for Catholicism, the more must the pope either
express his gratitude or appear to all Christians as the favourer of
heretics. To be more Catholic than the pope suited also his anti-Habsburg
policy; if Leopold I toyed with papally-supported schemes of reunion,
Louis would impress the German Catholic princes with his fervent care
for the maintenance of orthodoxy. To see himself as the reincarnation of
Constantine and Charlemagne was also in harmony with his passion for
glory. But that his personal conversion, not really influential till 1686, was
the major — or indeed even a min or — factor in this policy is not supported
by the evidence; moreover his confessor, Father La Chaise, who is some-
times accredited with devising it, had probably very limited political im-
portance. Nor does the persecution owe its origin or continuation to the
persuasions of Madame de Maintenon who in her authentic correspond-
ence expressed disapproval of the violent methods advocated by her
enemy Louvois; the letters so often quoted to prove her complicity have
been shown to be an eighteenth-century forgery. 1
1 For a review of the evidence, see J. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants (Paris, 1951),
pp. 91-4.
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The quickening tempo of action against the Huguenots is illustrated by
the fact that between 1 66 1 and 1 679 about twelve Acts were passed against
them, compared with no less than eighty-five between 1679 and 1685.
Many of these concerned petty but cumulatively intolerable restrictions
on religious and personal liberty and affected children as well as adults.
In 1681 Marillac, the intendant of Poitou, systematised the notorious plan
by which dragoons were forcibly quartered on Huguenot households, and
although there was criticism of the violence used, it was in 1685 extended
to other areas; as a result large parts of the south of France and other
districts were nominally returned to Catholicism, including the generalities
of Toulouse, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Poitiers and Montpellier as well as
the towns of Marseilles, Aubusson, Loudun and Rouen. Many Huguenots
emigrated, thereby causing alarm in the Conseil d'en haul at the loss to
commerce and industry. Simultaneously continued confused attempts at
reunion or comprehension, partly sincere and partly mere political
manoeuvres; there was some faith, some hope and even a little charity
behind the treatment of the Huguenots, as well as the degrading use of
force. And even force could be justified by the high authority of
St Augustine who had taught that, although coercion cannot make a
conversion, it may prepare a man to receive it. So argued Bossuet in his
sermon Compelle intrare (1685).
The Edict of Fontainebleau, registered in Parlement in October 1685,
killed the Reformed Church in France on the grounds that it was no
longer necessary since the majority of Frenchmen were now Catholics.
By its terms, which did not apply to Alsace, all Protestant churches were
destroyed, public and private worship proscribed, and all ministers
ordered to leave the country within fifteen days, although adult laymen
were forbidden to emigrate. Recent concessions, such as tax-exemption
for the newly converted, came to an end. Liberty of conscience was
allowed, but this meant nothing. Foremost among the opponents of the
treatment of the Huguenots was Le Camus of Grenoble who attacked the
idea of forced communions and the continuing use of the dragonnades.
The future was to show that Protestantism had been cowed rather than
killed. And as soon as the first spontaneous pleasure at the Revocation
had passed, king, clergy and laymen could see that new problems had
taken the place of the old.
One of the most important consequences was the revulsion that affected
many parts of Europe where Louis was in fact most anxious to bear a
good reputation, such as England and certain States in Germany. But the
daily arrival of Huguenot refugees was more persuasive than Louis’s
propaganda. It is impossible to establish with certainty the total
number of emigrants, but it may have reached two hundred thousand
or more. The United Provinces, England, Brandenburg, Switzerland,
North America and South Africa received many and, through them, the
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means of building up their prosperity at the expense of France. Irre-
parable harm was done to French religious life. Violence, forced and
sacrilegious communions and bribery brought Catholicism into disrepute,
and libertine ideas, comparatively unimportant since the first half of the
century, gained strength. Equally serious in another sphere was Innocent’s
refusal to be suitably impressed with Louis’s extinction of heresy. His
brief was cool and offered no concessions over the rigale, and the solemn
Te Deum and formal celebrations at Rome were offset by the elevation to
the purple of Le Camus, the opponent of Louis’s methods of violence.
The king’s policy towards Protestantism did not, in the main, bear the
fruits expected of it, any more than had his treatment of the Jansenists or
his plans for the regale. The elements of contradiction in all of them were
too strong, and in every case the capacity of the ecclesiastical forces for
resistance had been seriously underestimated by the secular arm.
In the officially Protestant countries of Western Europe — the United
Provinces, England and Scotland — the relationship of Church and State
was affected by different factors. In the first place, the established or
officially approved Churches in these countries were free from the super-
vision, as well as the support, of an international organisation such as the
papacy, but it would be misleading to think of them as consequently under
complete State control ; the theocratic tradition of Calvinism, for example,
was but one of the bulwarks against secular domination. Secondly, the
fissiparous character of Protestantism, with its emphasis on the indi-
vidual’s responsibility for his own salvation and lack of respect for
authority, led to the growth of sects outside the approved Church, whose
existence in an age when ideas of uniformity were still strong could not be
ignored by the rulers of either Church or State. Lastly, the Catholic
minorities in these countries often excited a fear disproportionate to their
size, though not always to their social standing: this was natural in the
light of current suspicions of Roman Catholics as agents of foreign powers
out to destroy both Protestant and national liberties.
After the bitter ecclesiastical quarrels of the first few decades of the
century, the United Provinces acquired the well-deserved reputation of
being the most tolerant country in Europe. This was achieved more by
failing to put the law into execution than by altering it, a policy followed
both during the stadholderless regime (1650-72) and under William III.
Thus the Arminians, proscribed and exiled by the Synod of Dort, but
strongly supported by the Regent class, were in practice widely tolerated,
and in Amsterdam and perhaps elsewhere enjoyed complete liberty of
worship ; their connections with the Cambridge Platonists and John Locke
are proof of their high intellectual standing. Sir William Temple, in his
Observations upon the United Provinces (published in 1673), described
them as ‘ rather the distinction of a Party in the State, than a Sect in the
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Church’, but this is hardly borne out by the dispute over the doctrine of
grace and forgiveness which broke out about 1660 between the latitudin-
arian Coccejus of Leiden and the strict Calvinist Voetius, although both
Regents and Orangists took sides, as they did in the controversy over
public prayers for the Prince of Orange. Protestant sects flourished and
Jewish synagogues existed in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The position of
the Catholics, who were numerous in the eastern provinces, in the
Generality Lands and in Amsterdam, was more complicated. Although
they had no legal protection for worshipping publicly, in practice they
enjoyed considerable freedom to do so on payment of fines; equally in
practice, though not in theory, they were normally allowed civic rights.
Temple was not the only observer to be struck by the prevailing lack of
coercion and general air of tolerance shown by a government interested
primarily in keeping order and fostering prosperity; that the Dutch were
prosperous partly because they were tolerant was a lesson often noted but
as yet seldom followed by the rest of Europe. But the publicity given to
this experiment in secularisation, helped greatly by the lack of press
censorship which was another characteristic of the United Provinces, was
in the long run to have the most important consequences. The Dutch
presses became the presses of liberal Europe, while Dutch cities gave
shelter to intellectual refugees of all creeds and nationalities.
In England the revolutionary period without an established Church
came to an end at the Restoration in 1660, when Anglicanism was sur-
prisingly quickly re-established. As a result of the consummate skill of
Clarendon and Gilbert Sheldon (from 1663 Archbishop of Canterbury)
the Presbyterians, who for their services in bringing about the king’s
return reasonably expected some concessions, were thoroughly out-
manoeuvred. With the least possible delay diocesan and parochial
administration was resumed on the old lines, and Church lands, sold
during the Interregnum, were restored. In April 1661 Charles II was
crowned with Anglican rites ; in May the newly elected Cavalier Parliament
received communion according to the Prayer Book. The Savoy Con-
ference between Anglicans and Presbyterians, which began in the former
month, and the new Parliament were left little to do but accept the fait
accompli-, except for the High Commission, the Church was re-established
as in 1640. One important change, the taxation of the clergy through
parliament instead of through Convocation, resulted not from the In-
terregnum, but from a private agreement in 1664 between Clarendon and
Sheldon. Henceforth Convocation, the power of the purse lost, was easily
set aside, and for long periods the Church had no official mouthpiece.
By the Act of Uniformity of May 1662 Puritans were excluded from the
Church, and the names Dissenter and Nonconformist explain their new
status outside the establishment. Less affront was done to the sects, whose
belief in a select brotherhood of the converted did not require political
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domination for its realisation, than to the Presbyterians with their theory
of a comprehensive State-Church. Exclusion was also to mean persecu-
tion, intermittent but sometimes violent, as central politics and the
resentment of local officials and their varying efficiency dictated. Hence-
forth to be a Nonconformist entailed loss of certain civil rights, as well as
the prohibition of public worship: the Corporation Act (1661) kept
Dissenters out of the government of the towns where their main strength
lay, as it did the Catholics whose worship was also proscribed. Within the
first twelve years of Charles’s reign, and again in the period of reaction after
the Popish Plot and the Rye House conspiracy, 1 the Nonconformists
suffered severely in many places as a result of the Conventicle Acts of 1664
and 1670, the Five Mile Act of 1665, and older laws still on the Statute
Book, as well as in the ecclesiastical courts. How far the government’s
policy was justified remains debatable. Although many Nonconformists
were politically harmless, the old association of Republicanism and
Dissent died hard, and the belief that discontented elements might use
conventicles as a cover for seditious activities was natural.
The exact date at which Charles II was converted to Rome is less
important than the fact that whenever politically possible he tried to
achieve some relief for the Catholics, and was willing to include Non-
conformists in his schemes as well. But Sheldon’s opposition led to the
stillbirth of a plan for concessions in 1662, and parliamentary criticism of
the royal claim to suspend statute law, even in ecclesiastical matters,
resulted in the withdrawal, a year after its issue, of the Declaration of
Indulgence of 1672. A combination of factors made the next ten years
particularly painful for the Catholics: news of the Duke of York’s con-
version, obvious to all by 1673, suspicions that the Treaty of Dover had
secret clauses dangerous to English liberties and Protestantism, and fear
of Louis XIV’s aggression, all contributed to the anti-Catholic policy
expressed in the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678 and culminated in the Popish
Plot and the Exclusion Crisis of 1 678-8 1 . 2 Yet the king’s masterly inactivity
defeated the Whigs who tried to prevent James’s succession to the throne;
the Tories built up their theories of passive obedience to the monarch and
the defence of the Church of England to counter the Whig programme of
toleration for all Protestants, the total exclusion of Catholics from all
places of responsibility, and a limited monarchy.
Restored Stuart rule did more violence to the Scottish Church. The
execution of Argyle and Johnston of Warriston indicated that the
Covenanters were not to be forgiven, while the Act Rescissory passed by
the subservient Parliament of 1661 swept away all legislation since 1633,
thus opening the way for the Privy Council to restore the hated system of
episcopacy. Two other measures were to ensure twenty-eight years of
1 For these events, see below, ch. xm, pp. 313-14, 317.
2 See below, ch. xm, pp. 310-14, 316-17.
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strife: the Act known as the ‘Bishops’ Drag-Net ’ imposed heavy fines oh
absentees from church and led to field conventicles, illegal and often
violently broken up; the restoration of private patronage made it neces-
sary for all who had received their charge direct from their congregation
to seek presentation and episcopal collation. The government was
surprised by the non-compliance of between two and three hundred
ministers who were to form the largely irreconcilable core of opposition,
both clerical and lay, which defied the settlement despite the most repres-
sive measures, mingled with periods of conciliation. The crisis came in
1679, with the murder of the detested Archbishop Sharp and Monmouth’s
defeat of the deeply divided rebels at Bothwell Brig. The last-ditch
defiance of the Cameronians who repudiated Charles as king was crushed
by military force. The final outcome of these troubles was, at the Revolu-
tion, the formal re-establishment of non-episcopal Presbyterianism, but
not the triumph of a theocracy.
While such conflicts continued to rage within many European countries,
some of the best minds of the age were concerning themselves increasingly
with the problems of reunion and toleration. Everyone, ecclesiastical and
lay, paid lip-service to the ideal of reunion among churches, whatever
suspicions might be aroused by attempts to make it a reality. On tolera-
tion there was less general agreement, for it entailed the sacrifice of the
time-honoured principles of unity and uniformity, both in Church and
State. Yet it was a more practicable objective. Reunion could be achieved
only by widespread voluntary or forced conversion, or by the com-
promise of the independence of the various Churches. Toleration, on the
other hand, required from the ecclesiastical point of view an acquiescence
in the errors of others, and on the State’s side a conviction that the
abandonment of uniformity was safe and expedient. For its advance this
period, with its growing secularisation and intellectual experiment, was
well suited, although the progress was but slow and uneven.
The movement for reunion was not new in the second half of the
seventeenth century; the cosmopolitan Scot, John Durie, had put his
schemes to Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstiema and later tried to
interest Cromwell in them ; in Grotius and Comenius the movement had
already had two outstanding intellects behind it. In the irenic efforts of
the later period three names are predominant: Leibniz, Bossuet and
Cristobal de Rojas y Spinola. Leibniz, brought up a Lutheran, was
apparently first attracted to the project by Johann Christian von Boineburg,
a convert to Catholicism, and influential at the court of the liberal-minded
Elector of Mainz, John Philip von Schonbom. In 1676 Leibniz accepted
an invitation to go as librarian to the court of Duke John Frederick of
Hanover, the Catholic ruler of a Lutheran State, and from then on till his
death in 1716 his restless intellect was at work on finding some method of
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bringing the Churches together, and his restless pen in writing to the
Landgrave of Hesse-Rheinfels, Pellisson, Bossuet or anyone else who
might be sympathetic. He believed that by honest discussion all con-
fessions could find agreement on the fundamental rules of faith, if they
submitted themselves to the Holy Spirit as the internal, and the Word of
God as the external, guide; he also placed much emphasis on the concept
of an inner communion, to which men might belong without being mem-
bers of the outer communion. He seemed prepared to go so far to meet
the Catholic position that some wrongly believed him to be a secret
convert. But his correspondence with Bossuet broke down on the
question of the authority of the Council of Trent. Meanwhile Bishop
Spinola was trying by personal persuasion and political manoeuvre to
bring about the same end. In 1673 he went round the Empire on behalf
of the Emperor Leopold I to get help for the Turkish war and on his
return reported to Rome on his efforts for^ reunion. Leopold’s pre-
occupation with both his eastern and western frontiers and Innocent XI’s
interest in the Turkish question led them to favour any expedient that
might further their ends, and Spinola’s somewhat naive confidence that
the Protestants he met in Dresden, Berlin, Hanover and Heidelberg were
enthusiastic for reunion was treated with some seriousness; but the pope’s
commission to examine the prospects came to a less optimistic conclusion.
In 1678 and 1682 Spinola set out again, but his hopes were greater than
his achievements. His main objective was to pave the way for a new
General Council and, in order to get free discussion, he was anxious that
the precedents of the Council of Trent and its decisions should be sus-
pended and the Protestants should not be regarded as schismatics. But
the forces against the movement were strong, and in fact the deaths of
Innocent in 1689 and of Spinola in 1695 brought a serious check to its
development.
More progress was made towards toleration, especially in some of the
German States and in the United Provinces. Theoretically the case in its
favour had often been stated. In England during the Interregnum, for
example, it had been argued that the magistrate had no concern with
religious matters, and that a State might safely shelter more than one
Church; that there was a Christian case for the suppression of heresy was
denied, and it was confidently maintained that a man should be allowed
to worship how he liked provided that he kept the peace. But more was
needed than such theories to persuade rulers and their subjects generally
that toleration was safe and expedient. Only as materialistic considera-
tions became increasingly important was it really believed that a man’s
religious convictions might be irrelevant to his loyalty and usefulness as a
citizen, and that a country, to become rich and prosperous, ought to
ignore religious barriers. The union of both the theoretical and practical
arguments is well illustrated in the association of John Locke, whose
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theory of toleration was drafted by 1667, and the Earl of Shaftesbury, the
dynamic politician with his belief that England could rival the Dutch as a
commercial power if only she would follow the example of the tolerant
United Provinces. 1 Few were prepared to allow that religious liberty
ought to be universal : both Locke and Shaftesbury would have refused it
to Catholics. But practice was often, as has been seen, more liberal than
the law, and the foundations were at least laid for a further extension of
the principle. Yet progress was far from universal: if the English Parlia-
ment passed a Toleration Act in 1689, France, four years earlier, had
returned to the ideal of uniformity with the Edict of Fontainebleau.
Plans for reunion and toleration were, however, only two ways in
which the distinctive temper of the times was manifested. Another
development to some extent transcending national and sectarian bound-
aries was the fairly widespread increase in a more personal and less
institutional (and, at the same time, a less intellectual) approach to religion,
which to some degree coincided with the waning attraction of Calvinism
in its strictest form which is a characteristic of the second half of the
seventeenth century. In England, for example, the Quakers carried the
Puritan conviction of the progressive revelation of the Holy Spirit to a
point where they abandoned the sacraments of the Church, as well as the
distinction between priesthood and laity. In Lutheran Germany the
Pietist movement, led by Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann
Francke, laid particular stress on the priesthood of all believers and thus
the part to be played by the laity in the Church, and also upon religious
experience in the place of doctrine and theological learning; Spener’s
meetings to study the Bible (the collegia pietatis ) were only one way by
which his teaching was spread. Quietism, in whose evolution the Spanish
mystic Miguel de Molinos was probably most influential, rejected the
validity and usefulness of all exterior activities and substituted for them an
attitude of total passivity, advocating a condition of ‘annihilation’ in
which God might work to bring the soul into a state of pure love. In spite
of genuine spirituality, Molinos ’s teaching was condemned in 1687, while
the writings of another Quietist, Madame de Guyon, were the subject of
prolonged controversy in France. All such movements tended to make
superfluous the traditional means by which the individual might achieve
grace through an established Church. Religious developments of quite
another kind were manifested in the latitudinarianism which dis-
tinguished the Arminians in the Netherlands as well as the Cambridge
Platonists and liberal Anglicans in England, who sought to bring a reason-
able and balanced outlook to theological and ecclesiastical problems and
tried to emphasise the common grounds of agreement, rather than the
differences between Christians. Their high intellectual standing and asso-
ciation with the most vigorous philosophical and scientific thought of the
1 Cp. below, ch. xiv, pp. 332-3 338 - 9 -
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day gave them a special importance at a time when these new ideas were
permeating the most active minds in Europe.
All these tendencies were in some sense a reaction of exhaustion and
disgust against the formalism and exclusiveness of the established
Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, and contemporary critics were
right in thinking that they had very real dangers: deism and atheism
were to find outspoken advocates by the end of the century. But con-
servative forces were still very strong. The widespread hatred of the
Jesuits with their allegedly easy morality, as shown in their casuistry and
particularly in probabilism, was in itself a tribute to their influence.
Popular superstition and piety still attracted the mass of the people more
than any new ideas, and the miracles claimed at Port-Royal had a
remarkable effect on men and women of a usually critical cast of mind.
But everywhere the tendency towards secularisation was growing.
Religion was slowly becoming more the concern of the individual and less
the responsibility of the State, and the State’s own raison d'etre was in its
turn changing: fewer men saw it as founded to ensure God’s purpose
through a divinely appointed ruler, and more believed its aim to be
human security and prosperity. Against such a background it was
inevitable that the relationship of Church and State should become less
and less one of partners in a divinely appointed task, and increasingly a
marriage of convenience in which expediency and individual advantage
were the guiding aims.
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CHAPTER VII
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
R ome was the centre where Baroque art originated and from where
it spread. The great non-Italian artists of the first half of the
^seventeenth century, Rubens and Rembrandt, Velasquez and
Poussin, could not have developed as they did without direct or indirect
contact with the artistic events in Rome. Even though conditions
radically changed after 1650, Rome must be given a large share in any
consideration of European art during the second half of the century.
All the great artists of the first generation of the Baroque — Annibale
Carracci (1560-1609), Caravaggio (1573-1610), Guido Reni (1575-1642),
and the architect Carlo Mademo (1556-1629) — died long before 1650. The
Fleming Rubens (b. 1577) died in Antwerp in 1640. Most of the great
masters of the next generation, those mainly bom in the last decade of the
sixteenth century, were still alive, among them Alessandro Algardi (1595—
1654), Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661), Francesco Borromini (1599-1667),
Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669), the Neapolitan sculptor and architect
Cosimo Fanzago (1591-1678), the Venetian architect Baldassare
Longhena (1598-1682), and the greatest of all, Gianlorenzo Bernini
(1598-1680). Of the non-Italians of this almost unbelievably strong
generation Velasquez (b. 1599) died in 1660, Poussin (b. 1593) in 1665,
Frans Hals (b. 1580), the oldest of this group, in 1666, Rembrandt
(b. 1606) in 1669, and Claude Lorrain (b. 1600) in 1682. All these artists
reached their full maturity in the fourth and fifth decades and only few
lived through the third and into the fourth quarter of the century.
The masters of the third generation, bom between about 1610 and
1630, are the primary concern of this chapter. They created their early
works around 1650 and matured in the sixth and seventh decades. It is
remarkable that there is hardly a single artist among them who can vie
with the great ones of the older generation. Painters such as the Neapoli-
tans Mattia Preti (1613-99), Salvator Rosa (1615-73), Bernardo
Cavallino (1616-56), and Luca Giordano (1632-1705), the Roman Carlo
Maratti (1625-1713), and the Genoese Giovan Battista Gaulli (1639—
1709) were the heirs to Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci, Sacchi and
Cortona. For several decades the architect Carlo Fontana (1634-1714) was
the arbiter of taste in Rome. Nor did any of the sculptors of this genera-
tion approach the calibre of Bernini and Algardi. The artists of the third
generation were respectable, versatile, and talented, but lacked the
universality and fullness of vision of their elders.
The position was not much different outside Italy. In France the
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legitimate successor to Poussin was Charles Lebrun (1619-90); in Spain
Velasquez was followed by Murillo (1617-82), Valdes Leal (1630-91) and
Claudio Coello (1642-93). After Van Dyck’s death (1599-1641), Sir Peter
Lely (1618-80) became the foremost portrait painter in England. In
Holland the specialists took over from Rembrandt and, by comparison,
even the greatest of them, Vermeer van Delft (1632-75), shrinks in
stature.
Although Re mini was alive till 1680 and enjoyed international fame to
the very end, the importance of Rome as the artistic metropolis of Europe
steadily declined. One can never fully account for such changes, but some
factors are clearly discernible. Since the Peace of Westphalia the authority
of the Holy See waned, and after the death of Alexander VII (1667) papal
patronage fell off considerably. During the last decades of the seventeenth
century artists in Rome were often starved of commissions, while other
Italian States witnessed a considerable increase of artistic activity. In
Venice the first half of the century was comparatively barren, but with the
Genoese Giambattista Langetti (1625-76), the German Johann Karl
Loth (1632-98), the Florentine Sebastiano Mazzoni (c. 1615-85), and
others working there after 1650, a process of recuperation began which
led to the magnificent flowering of the Venetian school in the early years
of the eighteenth century. The wealthy republic of Genoa spent vast sums
of money on the arts. Despite the disastrous plague of 1657 Genoa saw
the rise of a vigorous school of painting and sculpture and, although some
of her most gifted artists such as Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1610?-
65) and Giovan Battista Gaulli sought their fortunes elsewhere, Genoese
palaces and churches were opulently decorated at this time. But the most
remarkable development took place in Piedmont and Naples. Turin
entered a great phase of enlargement and embellishment under the
energetic Charles Emanuel II (1638-75), whose architects Amedeo di
Castellamonte, Francesco Lanfranchi, and, above all, Guarino Guarini
transformed the Piedmontese capital into a splendid Baroque city.
Naples had attracted outstanding Roman painters before the middle of
the century: Domenichino and Lanfranco spent years of their lives there.
The plague of 1656 pruned native talent very considerably; nevertheless
the ascendancy of the Neapolitan school of painting was such that for two
generations it had no rival in Italy.
Concurrently with this shift of gravity from Rome to the north and
south of Italy, there arose the challenge of Paris as a great artistic centre.
When, in 1661, the young Louis XTV decided to rule himself, Paris began
to dictate the taste of Europe. In retrospect Bernini’s abortive state visit
to the French capital appears like a public acknowledgment of Rome’s
lowered prestige in artistic matters. The royal invitation was extended to
the great Italian master because he alone appeared to be able to give the
Louvre, the old residence of the French kings, a form worthy of the
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greatest monarch on earth. But already at the time of Bernini’s departure
from Paris in the autumn of 1665, a change of spirit had come about. In
1667 Louis decided to abandon Bernini’s plans. A stately French design,
the result of collaboration between Claude Perrault (1613-88), Louis Le
Vau and Lebrun, was chosen for the east front of the Louvre, and the
difference between its cool formality and the impetuous grandeur of
Bernini’s project indicates the general direction of taste in the new age.
For an understanding of the international position in the arts after 1650
it is helpful to take stock of the various styles or trends which existed side
by side from the early seventeenth century onwards. There was the
Baroque trend in the narrower sense of the word, a boisterous style of
great vitality, the ancestry of which leads back to the ‘impressionist’,
‘painterly’ technique of the great Venetians of the sixteenth century, of
Titian and Veronese, and to Correggio’s bold illusionism in his dome
decorations at Parma. Early in the seventeenth century Rubens had
created an important aspect of this style by wedding Venetian colourism
and Flemish realism. Giovanni Lanfranco and Pietro da Cortona had
introduced other nuances : the former in his ceiling frescoes in Rome and
Naples with their breath-taking Correggiesque wizardry, the latter in his
passionate decorative manner which fused the experience of Veronese,
Correggio, Raphael, and the antique into compositions of extraordinary
density.
The second, more classical, trend took its cue from Annibale Carracci’s
grand manner which culminated in his frescoes of the Farnese Gallery;
this dramatic but somewhat cool manner was buttressed by a close study
of nature, antiquity, Raphael and Michelangelo, and of Venetian colour-
ism. None of the ‘Baroque’ artists could overlook the potentialities of
this style: it influenced Rubens as much as Pietro da Cortona and was
greatly admired by Bernini; but it also opened the way to Poussin’s
classicism. The third important trend may generically be called ‘realistic’.
Realism is a term of convenience which defies precise definition. It was
and is incorrectly applied to Caravaggio and, with more justice, to the
northern rendering of meticulous detail. It is used to denote the choice of
popular types as well as the portrayal of ‘low’ subjects, such as tavern
scenes; the direct working from the model as well as the unembellished
representation of religious imagery.
These three trends competed for recognition and primacy throughout
the seventeenth century, and there is hardly a time when they cannot be
found side by side. By and large, however, the Baroque current was pre-
eminent during the 1620’s and 1630’s, while a reorientation in the direction
of ‘Baroque classicism’ took place from the 1640’s onwards. Cara-
vaggism and realism influenced both currents to a varying degree at
different times in different countries, without ever being accepted as the
official style of the papacy, the courts, and the aristocracy.
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A few French examples may help to throw light on some of the intrica-
cies of the stylistic position during the critical decade. Simon Vouet
(1590-1649), who for many years had travelled and worked in Italy,
painted, long after his return to Paris, a Presentation in the Temple (1641 ;
Louvre) in the Italian Baroque manner — a composition with sweeping
diagonals, a scenographic perspective, and clusters of monumental
figures emotionally charged. During the same period Poussin, living in
Rome, produced such carefully arranged relief-like pictures as the
Rebecca and Eleazar (1648 ; Louvre) with its evident references to Raphael
and ancient models ; this is a severe, classical work wholly different from
Vouet’s. Louis Le Nain’s painting Peasants at Supper ( c . 1645; Louvre)
conducts the beholder into a homely scene faithfully rendered; none of
the paraphernalia of ‘ low life ’ — the peasants’ clothing, the tom trousers,
the utensils of the kitchen, cat and dog — are left unrecorded. But com-
pared with a Lanfranco or a Cortona, Vouet has moved away from
Baroque towards classical standards; compared with a late Le Sueur
(1616-55), Poussin’s work still has the rich and warm palette of Baroque
painting; and compared with Dutch genre painting, the monumental
scale of figures and the austerity of the frontal composition show Le Nain’s
realism subservient to classicism. Thus a classical quality is common to
the three pictures, and terminological barriers should not prevent us from
noticing it.
A different line of argument may lead to associating each of the three
main currents with specific national tempers and idiosyncrasies. The
Italian, Bernini, may be regarded as the peerless representative of the
Baroque current, the Frenchman, Poussin, as the champion of classicism,
and the Dutchman, Rembrandt, as the unrivalled protagonist of northern
realism. Even if this be admitted, the early careers of these great masters
reveal their beliefs in similar values. The early Rembrandt’s dramatic use
of light, derived from Caravaggio, his composing with prominent
triangles and diagonals, his interest in the great gesture and the monu-
mental Italian form — all this has parallels in the young Bernini’s interpre-
tation of sculpture and in Poussin’s painterly works of the same period.
From such Baroque beginnings each master developed towards an
entirely personal style. But again their late manners have something
important in common: all three found a simple structure of horizontals
and verticals more suited to express strong emotions than the rich
Baroque compositions of their early period.
The late Poussin, obsessed by his moral and rational approach to art,
clothed his convictions in puritanically severe forms and almost offen-
sively hard colours. The London Annunciation of 1657 and the even later
Leningrad Rest on the Flight into Egypt are typical examples. Bernini’s
late works reflect a mystic trend in Catholic seventeenth-century devotion
by showing increasingly violent movement within a framework of
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emphatically angular forms, as evidenced in the Blessed Lodovica
Albertoni (1674; S. Francesco a Ripa, Rome) and the bust of Gabriele
Fonseca (1668-75; S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome). Rembrandt went the
opposite way. The deeper the feeling, the more silent become his figures.
He needed neither Bernini’s extrovert violence nor Poussin’s statuesque
figures and classical compositions to express an ecstatic state of mind. In
his late pictures there is complete silence; the extremely simple figures
melt into space and the whole space seems to vibrate with emotion.
These three great artists echoed as well as shaped the longings of their
age. They reacted as immensely perceptive sounding-boards to the
society in which they lived. For over fifty years Bernini held the place of
the official artist of the papacy, serving five popes in succession. His
southern rhetoric and passion, his ability to conquer the minds of the
public by dazzling their eyes, his mastery in rendering the physical con-
dition of ecstasies and raptures, and his capacity of bringing home to the
faithful an intense experience of the supernatural — all this predestined
him to the unique part which he played as the artist of Catholic orthodoxy.
Poussin spent forty years in Rome, but most of his clientele lived in
Paris. As he advanced in age his circle of patrons and friends consisted
mainly of merchants and bankers, civil servants and lawyers, who
embraced Descartes’s rationalism as much as philosophical scepticism
and stoicism. This public hailed Poussin’s moral subjects and judicious
classicism as a pictorial manifestation of their most cherished ideals.
Rembrandt’s art had its roots in the burgher culture of Calvinist
Holland. His pantheism ennobled all creation from the meanest cripple
to a storm breaking in the sky. The revolution he wrought is best judged in
his religious work. He was the first artist to repeal fully and irreparably
the time-honoured iconography of the Catholic Church. Southern artists
had always expressed Christ’s divine nature by physical perfection. At the
beginning of his career Rembrandt interpreted Him in these familiar terms.
But gradually he conceived of Christ as ugly and humble and, at the end,
his anti-heroic and personal interpretation of the biblical stories was at
the farthest remove from the official art of Catholicism.
Bernini’s historical mission lay mainly in the Catholic south where his
influence persisted to the end of the eighteenth century. French and,
indeed, European classical art of the later seventeenth and even of the
eighteenth century drew its strength from Poussin’s work and ideas. The
further development of intimate realistic painting in northern Europe
cannot be dissociated from Rembrandt’s perennial achievement.
The intensity of the late styles of the great masters, however, was not
fully understood by the younger generation of artists. Soon after 1650 an
equalising tendency made itself felt throughout Europe, a reduction of the
capacity for individual expression, and a slackening of tension, and
despite the persistence of the different artistic currents an international
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style emerged under French hegemony. This uniform style was essentially
classical, but may be more correctly termed ‘Baroque classicism’.
Bernini’s, Poussin’s, and Rembrandt’s careers make it evident that the
struggle for its ascendancy took on different forms in the three artistically
most significant countries : Italy, France and Holland.
Since the Middle Ages Italians regarded the monumental fresco as the
primary task of painters. It is in this field that late seventeenth-century
painters gave of their best. With few memorable exceptions the most
sumptuous Baroque decorations in Roman churches and palaces were
created after 1650, often for much older buildings. The most ambitious
works of this kind are Gaulli’s frescoes executed between 1672 and 1683
in the late sixteenth-century Gesii, the mother church of the Jesuit Order,
and Andrea Pozzo’s immense ceiling (1691-4) in S. Ignazio. The
dramatic effect of Gaulli’s frescoes derives from the Beminesque juxta-
position of large dark and bright areas of paint and from the guidance
given to the eye in penetrating step by step to the unfathomable depth of
the sky, the lightest area, where the name of Christ appears amid shining
rays. Another device, also owed to Bernini, requires comment: Gaulli
blended fresco and painted stucco and let parts of the painted ceiling spill
over on to the architecture of the vault — a contrivance meant to engage
the beholder as forcefully as possible. In contrast to Gaulli, Pozzo placed
a host of figures representing the apotheosis of St Ignatius into an illu-
sionist architectural framework which expanded immensely the actual by
a feigned structure. This method called quadratura looked back to a
learned Renaissance tradition, but had never been employed on such a
scale. Both types of Baroque ceiling painting — that with figures breaking
through the retaining frame so that they seem to close in on the beholder,
and that with the perspective widening of pictorial space so that the painted
action appears to be at a great distance — found enthusiastic following,
mainly in the Austrian and German Baroque of the eighteenth century.
These as well as other exuberant Baroque fresco cycles seem to belie
the notion that Italian painting was developing in the direction of an
international classicism. But while Gaulli was engaged on his Gesii
frescoes Carlo Maratti painted a large ceiling with the Triumph of
Clemency (after 1673) in the family palace of the Altieri Pope Clement IX.
He relinquished all forms of Baroque illusionism ; once again the fresco is
clearly and simply framed and an attempt is made to reinstate the import-
ance of the plastically conceived individual figure. In the struggle for
primacy between Gaulli and Maratti, Gaulli’s mystical Late Baroque had
no chance whatever against Maratti’s rationalist classicism. As early as the
1670’s Maratti’s success was assured. Soon even Gaulli’s style began to
lose its intensity; in spite of Pozzo’s work in S. Ignazio, before the end of
the century Rome had surrendered to Maratti’s manner.
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Maratti’s classicism had little in common with the heroic ‘Early
Baroque classicism ’ of Annibale Carracci. To be sure, it had close points
of contact with the sublime and painterly ‘High Baroque classicism’
which Maratti’s teacher Andrea Sacchi practised in the 1640’s and 1650’s.
But Maratti, the master of the third generation, went further towards a
reconciliation of the two opposing trends, the Baroque and the classical.
He steered an agreeable middle course : his paintings contain few riddles,
little to puzzle the beholder or to rouse deep emotions. The admixture of
just the right dose of festive splendour is characteristic of his ‘Late
Baroque classicism’. It was this style, to which without doubt Paris
contributed, that had an all-Italian following for at least a generation.
Italians, however, never entirely submitted to a pattern. There never
was a central organisation with power to dictate in matters of taste. A
spirit of conformity has always been suspect in Italy. The Neapolitan
Salvator Rosa, who died in Rome in 1673 after a stay there of almost a
generation, is a case in point. A man of extraordinary talent, but a rebel
in perpetuity, he gave his best in battlepieces, landscapes, and marine
paintings : wild scenes with a romantic flavour, painted with a tempestuous
brush. A number of individualists outside Rome also reacted vigorously
against the rising tide of High and Late Baroque classicism. Mazzoni and
Langetti, who worked in Venice, have been mentioned. Similarly,
Valerio Castello (1624-59) and his Genoese successors loved violent
contrasts and fiery hues. The Neapolitans Mattia Preti and Luca
Giordano, both working up and down the peninsula, displayed in their
paintings a dynamic power without parallel in Italy or elsewhere in the
last decades of the century. All these artists as well as scores unnamed
preferred work with the loaded brush and sketchy juxtapositions of small
areas of colour to the smooth handling of paint, used unexpected colour
contrasts rather than a harmonious scale of tones, and opposed violent
movement, drama, and even a new mysticism to the facile rhetoric of the
classicists.
Only up to a point is the history of Italian Baroque painting paralleled
by the history of sculpture and architecture. The position of sculptors was
prejudiced by the overpowering genius of Be rnini . Nobody could ignore
him; you had to be with him or against him, but even his opponents
lived under his shadow. Before 1650, during Algardi’s and Duquesnoy’s
lifetime, there had been much greater variety. Soon after that date the
conservative Ercole Ferrata (1610-86) led the right wing and the progres-
sive Antonio Raggi (1624-86) the left wing of the Bernini school. Their
work can best be studied in the monumental marble reliefs of S. Agnese
in Piazza Navona (1660). In his vast cycle of stuccoes in the clerestory
of the nave and transept of the Gesu (1669-83), Raggi, the most gifted
sculptor of his generation, yielded wholly to Bernini’s late mystical style.
But it was Ferrata who headed a large school to which sculptors from all
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Italy flocked. When Ferrata and Raggi died in 1686, the only famous
sculptor of their generation still alive was Domenico Guidi (1625-1701).
In spite of his mediocrity he was hailed the first sculptor in Rome. It is
characteristic that he maintained close contacts with the French and even
obtained, in 1677, a commission for a marble group at Versailles; but
since he was still steeped in Bernini’s grand manner, his group gave little
satisfaction at the French court.
It was at this time, after the foundation of the French Academy in
Rome (1666), that French sculptors went to the Eternal City in great num-
bers. Some of them stayed many years and obtained important com-
missions, among them P. S. Monnot (1657-1733), G. B. Theodon
(1646-1713), and P. Legros (1656-1719). Thus towards the end of the
century the French exercised a stronger influence on Roman sculpture
than on Roman painting. Camillo Rusconi (1658-1728) rehabilitated to a
certain extent the autonomy of the Roman school. But his Late Baroque
classicism — a forceful, belated parallel to Maratti’s style in painting — did
not come into its own until the early years of the next century.
Owing to Bernini’s authority Rome remained the international centre
for sculpture much longer than for painting. All through the seventeenth
and far into the eighteenth century Roman sculptors also worked for
other Italian cities and even found patrons, eager to be served by them, in
Germany, Poland, Portugal, England, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, in the
last decades of the century flourishing local schools sprang up in Naples,
Florence, Bologna, Genoa, and Venice. The Florentine Ferdinando
Tacca (1619-86) still maintained a good deal of native Tuscan reserve.
With Ferrata’s pupil, Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652-1737), the high-
water mark of Beminesque sculpture was reached in Florence. In Filippo
Parodi (1630-1702) Genoa had her first and greatest native Baroque
sculptor, and the later development of the Genoese school was dependent
on his distinguished achievement. Venice attracted sculptors from
northern countries. The most vigorous of them was Josse de Corte
(1627-79), who was born at Ypres and, after studying in Rome, settled in
Venice in 1657. He introduced Baroque sculpture into Venice, and his
collaborators and pupils continued his picturesque manner far into the
eighteenth century.
Some of the finest buildings of the Roman Baroque fall into the period
under review. Ber nini ’s architectural commissions lay mainly between
about 1650 and 1670. Of his three church buildings, the palm must go to
S. Andrea al Quirinale (1658-70), a small structure over an oval ground-
plan. Here one can best study Bernini’s dramatic use of colour and light,
and his sophisticated blending of architecture and sculpture. All the
significant lines of the building converge upon the figure of St Andrew
who appears soaring upward through the gilded dome. His apotheosis
dominates the entire space and on entering the church the beholder
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immediately partakes in this ‘mystery in action’. Modern critics some-
times maintain that there is a contradiction between the classicality of
Bernini’s architecture and the Baroque spirit of his sculpture; they
evidently fail to understand that, by giving his churches an entirely non-
classical meaning, Bernini endowed classical forms with a new content.
If executed, the Louvre would have been by far thejnost important of
Bernini’s secular buildings and its influence on European architecture
might have been startling. Even so, the engravings after his project had
an impact that was felt from Prague to Stockholm and Madrid. With the
palace he built in Rome for Cardinal Flavio Chigi (1664 ff. ; now Palazzo
Chigi-Odescalchi), Bernini introduced a revolutionary type of palace
design. The articulation by a closely set colossal order, the juxtaposition
of the highly organised central block with the rusticated lower wings, the
fine balance between masses (interfered with when the facade was leng-
thened in the eighteenth century), the subtle gradation of motifs from
storey to storey — all this combined in a design of authentic nobility and
grandeur. Bernini had found the formula for the aristocratic Baroque
palace; it was followed and imitated in most European countries.
Between 1656 and 1667 Bernini carried out his greatest architectural
work, the piazza of St Peter’s. He was faced by a staggering tangle of
topographical, structural, symbolic, liturgical and aesthetic problems,
but he rose to the occasion and produced one of the great masterpieces of
all time that has always been admired without reservation. Two wide
arms of open colonnades standing four columns deep embrace a large
oval piazza which forms a festive and serene forecourt to the basilica.
Never before had self-contained, free-standing colonnades been used for a
similar purpose. The visual impression is one of irresistible power and
grandeur. No other structure of the post-Renaissance period shows an
equally deep affinity to Greek architecture. Nor was it possible to handle
the traditional grammar of architectural forms with such self-assurance
before the seventeenth century. The Hellenic quality of the piazza could
only be produced by the greatest Baroque artist, who was a sculptor at
heart. For almost two hundred years Be rnini ’s piazza remained an
inspiration to urban designers.
Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona created some of their
finest architectural work in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Although they stand for very different facets of the High Baroque, their
late styles reveal a distinct simplification and broadening of architectural
forms and motifs; it may therefore be claimed that they too conformed to
the general trend towards classicism. This tendency was, however, not yet
noticeable in S. Agnese in Piazza Navona, which Girolamo and Carlo
Rainaldi began in 1652 and which a year later Borromini continued with
considerable alterations. In 1657 Carlo Rainaldi in turn replaced
Borromini and immediately adjusted the latter’s design where still possible.
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Although the completion of the church took many years and the interior
decoration was not finished until the end of the century, the church must
be regarded as essentially Borromini’s work. It represents an important
landmark in the history of architecture, for it is no less than the High
Baroque revision of Bramante’s centralised plan for St Peter’s of which
little was executed. Never before had such a rich and varied group of
facade, towers, and dome been created with similarly intense spatial
suggestions. The further genesis of centralised planning and of the two-
tower facade in Italy and the rest of Europe is unthinkable without this
key structure.
By contrast, Borromini’s most important late work, the church and
facade of the Collegio di Propaganda Fide (1662), was too personal a
creation to exercise a significant influence. In the interior of the church he
broke with the Renaissance principle, to which most Baroque architecture
conformed, of giving prominence to the walls and using the orders for the
rhythmic articulation. Here the orders form a coherent structural
‘skeleton’ reminiscent of Gothic building methods. A comparison of
Borromini’s facade of the Oratory of St Philip Neri (1637 ff.) with that of
the Collegio di Propaganda Fide illustrates his change of style over
twenty-five years. Gone is a great mass of detail, gone are the many
gradations of wall surface and the almost joyful display of a great variety
of motifs. All particulars are reduced to a minimum of austere forms
resulting in an oppressive, well-nigh nightmarish effect. The church and
facade of the Propaganda Fide with their compelling simplicity and
unorthodox logic fittingly conclude Borromini’s career as an architect.
Next to Bernini, Colbert had invited Pietro da Cortona to submit plans
for the Louvre. They do not survive, but his design for a Chigi palace
planned for the Piazza Colonna by Alexander VII may supply a clue to the
character of the lost Louvre project. The design for the Chigi pope, now
in the Vatican Library, shows for the first time in Baroque architecture a
powerful giant order of columns screening a concave wall above a
rusticated ground floor. Among Cortona’s late architectural work two
remarkable church facades have pride of place. The facade of Sta Maria
della Pace (1656-7) presents a fascinating interplay of convex and concave
forms. But perhaps even more important is the systematisation of the
small piazza which is derived from the theatre: the church appears like
the stage, the piazza like the auditorium, and the flanking houses like the
boxes. In the facade of Sta Maria in Via Lata (1658-62) Cortona carried
simplification a decisive step further. The classicising tendencies already
apparent in the sober Doric of Sta Maria della Pace are strengthened; in
contrast to the complexity of Cortona’s early SS. Martina e Luca one
finds here the crystalline clarity of a few great motifs.
Each of the three great masters, Bernini, Borromini and Cortona, had
an incalculable influence on the further course of the history of architec-
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ture. In Rome Carlo Fontana (1634-1714) transformed Bernini’s full*
blooded style into an academic maimer characteristic of the fin du siecle.
Fontana started his career as an architectural draughtsman and clerk of
works to Cortona, Rainaldi and Bernini. His own works date from the
time after 1665 and his Late Baroque classicism, a precise architectural
parallel to Maratti’s manner, was fully formed in the facade of S. Marcello
al Corso (1682). Indefatigably industrious, erudite and bookish, he
produced an endless number of designs for chapels, tombs, altars,
fountains, festival decorations, and even for statuary. The glamour
attached to his name as the legatee of the great masters made his studio an
international centre of aspiring architects. The Sicilian Filippo Juvarra
(1678-1736), the Austrian Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723), the German
M. Daniel Poppelmann (1662-1736), the English James Gibbs (1682-
1754) — all learned their lesson from him. Through him many Beminesque
motifs became widely accepted in the early eighteenth century.
No less important was the current stemming from Borromini. He was
mainly followed by non-conformist architects who were fascinated by
dynamic spatial and articulating conceptions which defied traditional
usage. Borromini found successors in the north and south of Italy and in
Austria and southern Germany rather than in Rome. But Borrominesque
mouldings, window- and door-surrounds, comer solutions, and other
details soon formed part of the international language of architecture.
Cortona was probably most effective through his imaginative decorative
style, which culminates in the ceilings of the grand ducal apartment in the
Palazzo Pitti at Florence (1640-7). It is the union of dignity and stateli-
ness, of the festive, the swagger, and the grand, that predestined his
decorative manner to be internationally followed in aristocratic and
princely dwellings. The style Louis XIV owes more to the decorations of
the Palazzo Pitti than to any other single source.
Two other architects active in the second half of the seventeenth century
require special attention. Though less distinguished than the three great
masters, the Roman Carlo Rainaldi (1611-91) is connected with some of
the outstanding architectural tasks of his time. During the 1660’s and
1670’s he executed Sta Maria in Campitelli, the facade of S. Andrea della
Valle, and the churches in the Piazza del Popolo. Sta Maria in Campitelli
(1663-7) is one of the most interesting Baroque churches in Rome. The
interior as well as the facade show a unique synthesis of North Italian
scenic features with a typical Roman gravity. Never before had the
North Italian ‘aedicula facade’ (where two canopies seem to be set one
into the other) been blended with the specifically Roman increase in the
volume of the orders from pilasters to half-columns and free-standing
columns. This new type of Baroque facade had an immense success : it
was constantly repeated and readapted to particular conditions. The
churches in the Piazza del Popolo (1662-79) have a complicated building
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history and at some stage Bernini and Carlo Fontana had a hand in their
construction. They presented a difficult town-planning problem, for they
create not only a monumental front on the piazza, but also crown the
wedge-shaped sites, unifying and emphasising the ends of long street-
fronts. The weaving into one of street and square was a new urban device
which had a future in France rather than in Italy.
The second name is that of Guarino Guarini (1624-83), whose settling
in Turin in 1666 opens the era of the extraordinary flowering of Pied-
montese architecture. Guarini, a Theatine priest, started his career as
a theologian, philosopher, and mathematician. He began practising
architecture in Messina (1660) and executed works (no longer existing) in
Paris and Lisbon before accepting the call of Charles Emanuel II of
Savoy. His principal works in Turin — the Cappella della SS. Sindone
adjoining the Cathedral (1667-90), the church of S. Lorenzo (1668-87),
and the Palazzo Carignano (1679 if.) — are among the most remarkable
creations of European architecture. He is often, incorrectly, regarded as a
follower of Borromini. To be sure, both architects were non-conformists,
but otherwise they had little in common. Borromini strove after the
creation of homogeneous structures, while Guarini displayed deliberate
contradictions, surprising dissonances, seeming inconsistencies, and com-
plex wall boundaries. His telescoping of drum and dome into unheard of,
hybrid formations, his diaphanous domes which had no tradition in
western Europe, the almost unbelievable boldness of some of his creations :
all show that Guarini wanted to give artistic expression to a distinct
philosophical concept. It is perhaps not too bold to assume that he, the
devoted student of Descartes’s and Desargues’s new mathematics, intended
to suggest infinity by architectural devices. His longitudinal churches, of
which none survive, were designed with undulating walls, an intricate
system of vaulting, and baffling combinations of spatial shapes. On these
designs depended to a considerable extent the development of the German
and Austrian Baroque architecture.
To turn from Guarini’s architecture to the artistic position in France is
nothing short of an anticlimax. Guarini himself started the Theatine
church of Ste Anne-la-Royale in Paris in 1662 (destroyed), precisely at the
moment when a distinctly national style began to develop and Italian
non-conformism and exuberance were viewed with suspicion and even
disgust. The rise of French classicism between 1630 and 1660 went hand
in hand with the consolidation of France as a great power. All the artists
who matured during that period accomplished the transition to various
facets of a classicist manner. Apart from the two greatest architects,
Francois Mansart (1598-1666) and Louis Le Vau (1612-70), the names of
the most important painters may be recalled: in the 1640’s Philippe de
Champaigne (1602-74) began to change his early Baroque manner,
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derived from Rubens, and progressively embraced an extremely austere
style; George de La Tour’s (1593-1652) early Caravaggesque phase was
followed by a frozen and completely detached idiom; after romantic
beginnings the landscapist Gaspar Dughet (1615-75) submitted to the
influence of his brother-in-law, Poussin; Eustache Le Sueur (1616-55)
first followed Vouet’s Baroque manner and ended his career with cool and
precise Raphaelesque paintings; Sebastian Bourdon (1616-71) in his
early period painted in a variety of manners, but had a strictly Poussin-
esque late period.
These artists essentially belong to the pre-Louis XTV era. They were
individualists who obeyed the call of conscience without submitting to a
dictatorship of taste. Those who lived far into the third quarter of the
seventeenth century (Claude died as late as 1682) were then the outmoded
old guard, remnants of an age that came to an end when, after 1661,
Colbert assumed control of the arts in France.
Colbert was immediately resolved to centralise all artistic activity under
one head. His choice fell on the versatile Charles Lebrun (1619-90)
whose easy decorative talent and first-rate organising ability stamped him
as the man of the new era. In 1663 he was appointed director of the
Gobelins factory the scope of which was much wider than its name reveals.
He exercised full authority over an army of painters, sculptors, engravers,
weavers, cabinet-makers and others. To their combined effort the world
owes that rich, pretentious, pompous, and at the same time pedantic
decorative style which rightly bears the name of the king whose aggran-
disement it mainly served.
For the theoretical control of art production Colbert turned his
attention to the academies. The Royal Academy of Painting and Sculp-
ture, though founded in 1648, received its final constitution not until 1663.
The first real academies of art with an elaborate educational programme
saw the light of day in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century. Colbert
built on this foundation and his Paris Academy, fenced in by a social
hierarchy, a theoretical and practical syllabus, all the frills of academic
training, and formal lectures in which the rules of correct art were dis-
cussed, became the model of art academies all over Europe — a develop-
ment which took more than a hundred years to be completed. Colbert
demanded absolute authority for the Academy. Its members were
granted monopolistic privileges, and a successful career as an artist was
only possible as an academician. All other intellectual activities were
equally centrally controlled through newly founded academies: that of
Dance in 1661, of Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (concerned with matters of
erudition) in 1663, of Science in 1666, of Music in 1669, and of Archi-
tecture in 1671. The year 1 666 also saw the establishment of the Academic
de France in Rome for the specific purpose of giving artists a classical
training at the fountain head.
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When Italian Renaissance artists began to aspire to a high social
standing, they opened up a gulf between the crafts and the ‘fine arts’. Yet
the schism between the artist as a creator in solitude and the rest of
society was resolved in Louis’s France. Not unlike medieval artisans,
French artists again became integrated into a system of society, but not
without sacrificing their hard-won freedom. No greater contrast can be
imagined than that between them and Bernini at the time of his Paris
visit. Italy never knew the spiritual climate of a centralised autocracy and
bureaucracy. Bernini said what he thought; and his French colleagues
trembled when he opened his mouth. He despised their lack of imagina-
tion and originality, their narrow dogmatism and, above all, the slavish-
ness of their lives. ‘Submission’, he said, ‘is necessary only in matters of
faith; otherwise man has complete freedom in all spheres of life.’ 1
Nevertheless the teaching of the French Academy was deeply rooted in
Italian art theory. The classical theory, derived from Aristotle and, in the
Renaissance, first formulated by Leon Battista Alberti, held as its central
doctrine that the synthesis accomplished in a work of art must result from
a rational and selective process. Giovanni Bellori (1615-96), a learned
antiquarian, librarian of Queen Christina of Sweden, a friend and
councillor of the classical circle of artists in Rome, intimate of Poussin
and Duquesnoy, made the supreme statement of this theory in a lecture,
entitled Video, del pittore, dello scultore e dello architetto, read to the
Academy of St Luke in Rome in 1664. Bellori’s theory was practised by
Poussin. His procedure as a painter was rational; carefully calculating,
he endeavoured to give his works the objective quality of ancient art, for
according to the current ideology the artists of antiquity had consum-
mated a perfect selection from nature and thus created works of ideal
beauty. Poussin’s method was taught and followed in the French
Academy. The painter Sebastian Bourdon discussed it in a lecture to his
fellow academicians. ‘When a painter has made a drawing from the living
model,’ he said, ‘he should make another study of the same figure on a
separate sheet and should try to give it the character of an ancient statue.’ 2
And in one of his lectures Lebrun traced the ancient models for each
figure in Poussin’s Gathering of Manna (Louvre). In the hands of such
men art almost became a logical discipline. Poussin’s work and Bellori’s
Idea were the two main pillars on which the edifice of the French art of
the later seventeenth century rested.
The requirements of the new bourgeoisie, however, to which most of
Poussin’s friends and patrons belonged, and of the court differed. To be
sure, classicism — a rational style that can easily be taught and learned, a
1 M. de Chantelou, Journal du voyage du Cav. Bemin en France, ed. L. Lalanne (Paris,
1885).
* A. de Montaiglon, Procis-verbaux de I'Acadimie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris,
1875)-
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style that permits no vagaries and imposes conformity — may be the most
adequate artistic expression for a rigorously centralised absolutism. On
the other hand, grandeur, ceremonial solemnity, sublimity, and exaltation
had a special place in the lives of the monarch and the court and as an
artistic vehicle for such needs the Baroque style was ready at hand. Thus
official art in the age of Louis XIV does not fully accord with current
theory. The style Louis XIV can perhaps best be defined as an Italianate
Baroque tamed by classicist principles. As we saw, Pietro da Cortona
signally contributed to the formation of this French Late Baroque, which
soon had international currency.
Louis’s Versailles is the supreme achievement of this style, the hall-mark
of the epoch, and the symbol of the glory of France at a heroic moment of
her history. The new Versailles began to take shape between 1668 and
1671 when Le Vau incorporated an older palace into a considerably larger
design. The present enormous garden front with its unrelieved horizontal
of over 550 yards resulted from the alterations and extensions executed by
Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646-1708) between 1679 and 1689. To this
period also belongs the celebrated Galerie des Glaces for the decoration of
which Lebrun, leader of an army of artists, was responsible. Hyper-
trophic scale, ghttering materials, the stateUness and pomposity of the
interior — aU this was genuinely expressive of the most ceremonial court
in Europe and of a court society keyed up to extravagantly splendid and
elaborate pageantries.
The French garden- and town-planning schemes of the period represent
another facet of the love for the colossal, but the colossal bridled by
reason and rule. Andre Le Notre (1613-1700), surveyor general of the
royal works (1657), was the man of vision and genius who created the
French formal garden of the Baroque. His greatest triumph was the
gardens of Versailles where vast spaces are made subservient to symmetry
and geometry. Straight avenues and trimmed boskets, staircase and
cascade, large ponds and fountains, vases and statues are blended into a
magnificent composition. It has been weU said that the garden a la
frangaise is ‘a lesson in order. At the time of Louis XTV it was also a
lesson in grandeur.’ 1 Le Notre also designed the plan of the town of
Versailles. On the square in front of the chateau long avenues converge
which find their counterpart in the garden. Thus town and park form a
supreme unit with the chateau as focusing-point from either side.
The straight road, the vista of prodigious length with the monumental
point de vue at its end, converging avenues, the rond-point with radiating
streets, monuments as terminal perspectives centred on regular squares,
street fronts conforming to a coherent design, the uniform planning of
whole areas — though many of these elements of French town-planning
had older, partly Italian pedigrees — they were never deliberately and
1 P. Lavedan, French Architecture (Penguin Books, 1956).
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consistently combined in designs of such magnificent scale before the age
of Louis XTV. Paris was given its urban physiognomy in those years.
The Champs-filysees and the Place de l’fitoile, the Place des Victoires and
the Place Vendome, and the splendid layout of the Hotel des Invalides,
with the streets converging on the Place Vauban, set the example for no
less ambitious schemes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Next to these achievements in urban planning only a few individual
buildings can be given a passing mention: the College des Quatre-Nations
(1661-2), still close to the Roman Baroque, erected by Le Vau, the
architect of the Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte; the vast Hotel des Invalides,
with its severe arcaded courts designed by Liberal Bruant (1670-6) and
its high domed church over a centralised plan constructed later by
Hardouin-Mansart (1679-1708); finally the austerely classical Porte
Saint-Denis (1672) by Nicolas-Fran^ois Blondel (1618-86), whose Cours
d' architecture enseigne a VAcademie royale (1675-83) summarises the
doctrinaire teaching at the Academy.
During the first half of the seventeenth century French sculpture was at
a low ebb. Jacques Sarrazin (1588-1660) created the typically French
brand of Baroque classicism with his tomb of Henri de Bourbon, Prince
de Conde, at Chantilly (1648-63). The brothers Francois and Michel
Anguier (1604-69, 1613-86) represent similar tendencies, as the latter’s
classicised Cortonesque decorations of the rooms of the Queen Mother in
the Louvre (1655-8) as well as his famous Nativity (St Roch, 1665) attest.
But it was three younger artists, Francois Girardon (1628-1715), Antoine
Coysevox (1640-1720), and Pierre Puget (1620-94), who led French sculp-
ture to new heights. Girardon in particular was a man to Lebrun’s taste.
He therefore played a leading part in the decoration of Versailles. His
masterpiece is the many-figured group of Apollo tended by the Nymphs for
a grotto in the park (1666) in which he skilfully blended the experience of
Hellenistic sculpture with that of the late Poussin. Characteristically, the
younger Coysevox found his way back to a freer, more Baroque concep-
tion of sculpture. This is less obvious in his many outdoor statues and
fountains at Versailles (1679-87) than in the interior decoration, above all
in the Galerie des Glaces and the Salon de la Guerre where he created his
most Baroque work, the large oval with the stucco relief of the victorious
Louis XIV on horseback. In some of his portrait busts Coysevox
achieved a degree of freedom of expression and penetration that presaged
the dawn of a new age. But the only really non-conformist artist of this
period was Puget ; his extreme form of individualism made it impossible
for him to get commissions at court during Colbert’s lifetime. Trained in
Italy under Pietro da Cortona, he worked for six years in Genoa (1661-7)
and spent the rest of his life at Toulon and Marseilles. His most famous
works, the Milo of Crotona (Louvre, 1671-83) and the relief of Alexander
and Diogenes (Louvre, 1671-93) reveal the tempestuous disposition of this
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great artist who owed no less to Michelangelo than to the Roman Baroque
masters.
The Catholic Spanish Netherlands were closely tied to the artistic
ideology of the south. Rubens and Van Dyck completely dominated the
first half of the seventeenth century and their influence did not abate for
several generations. Their immediate successors, painters such as Abraham
van Diepenbeeck (1596-1675), Theodor van Thulden (1606-76) and
Erasmus Quellin (1607-78), were entirely obscured by the greater stars.
The only exception is the Antwerp master Jakob Jordaens (1593-1678)
who excelled in giving full-blooded portrayals of Flemish life; but in the
last phase of his career his powers declined.
Many of the Flemish painters began with an Italianising, often
Caravaggiesque manner, only to embrace at the end the classicising
French idiom. Bertholet Flemalle (1614-75) is a case in point. His pupil
Gerard Lairesse (1640-1711), the author of a famous work on the prin-
ciples of design, was entirely swayed by the French Academy. Even a
genre painter like David Teniers the Younger (1610-90), who had an
enormous practice at Antwerp and Brussels, did not escape the equalising
tendencies of his age. Lairesse settled in Amsterdam where he enjoyed
an excessive reputation. It is remarkable that at the end of the century his
shallow allegories and mythologies with their courtly French imprint
evoked such enthusiasm in puritanical Holland; for the course of Dutch
painting had gone in a different direction.
In contrast to the Catholic south, Protestant Holland had almost no
place for official painting. Freed from the patronage and tutelage of the
Church of Rome as well as from the shackles imposed by sovereigns and
courts, Dutch artists refuted the grand manner together with the restric-
tions of the traditional iconography and extended their quest far beyond
the limits dictated by the southern art theory. The whole range of the
visible world had become their haunt. Thus seventeenth-century Holland
witnessed an unparalleled blossoming of intimate religious imagery, of
the still-life, landscape and seascape; of the conversation piece and all
types of genre painting; of portraiture of individual burghers and of
burgher corporations. Many of the Dutch artists worked for the art
market rather than for patrons. As a result the art dealer and the sales
room, not totally unknown before, assumed key positions in regulating
supply and demand. In this respect as in many others the Dutch constella-
tion foreshadows that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More-
over, the average Dutchman regarded pictures as an investment ‘so that
it is an ordinary thing to find a common farmer lay out two or three
thousand pounds in this commodity ’ (Evelyn). Indeed, Dutch paintings
were soon collected in every European country.
All the different branches of painting practised in Holland had long
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pedigrees; but now they developed into highly specialised fields. Jan van
Goyen (1596-1656), Aelbert Cuyp (1620-91), Karel Dujardin (1622-78),
Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9-82), Adriaen van de Velde (1636-72), and
Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709) painted only landscapes; Pieter Qaesz
(1597/8-1661), Willem Heda (1594-1680), Jan de Heem (1606-83/4),
Abraham van Beyeren (1620/1-c. 1675) and Willem Kalf (1622-93) mainly
still-lifes; the two Willem van de Velde (father and son), Jan van de
Cappelle (1624-79), and Ludolf Backhuyzen (1630-1708) only marine
paintings; Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712) and Gerrit Berckheyde
(1638-98) only townscapes; Pieter Saenredam (1597-1665) and Emanuel
de Witte (1617-92) only interiors of churches.
Specialisation was even carried a step further. Not a few painters
concentrated on specialities within their chosen field. Aert van der Neer
(1603-77) is the painter of moonshine and winter landscapes; Philips
Wouwermans (1619-68) of landscapes with horses, and Paulus Potter
(1625-54) of landscapes with cattle; Philips Koninck (1619-88) paints
panoramic views, and Allaert van Everdingen (1621-75) rocky scenery
with waterfalls; Jan Weenix (1640-1719) is the master of the hunting
still-life, while Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636-95) renders poultry.
Various forms of the bourgeois and upper-class genre and conversation
piece were the preserve of a large group of artists, among them Pieter
Codde (1599/1600-78), Anthonie Palamedesz (c. 1601-73), Gerard Dou
(1613-75), Gerard Terborch (1617-81), Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-
78), Gabriel Metsu (1629-67), Pieter de Hooch (1629-c. 1677), Jan
Vermeer van Delft (1632-75), and Pieter Janssens (c. 1640-c. 1700). The
lower genre had high-class practitioners in Jan Steen (1626-79), Adriaen
van Ostade (1610-85), and his pupils Comelis Bega (1620-64) and
Comelis Dusart (1660-1704).
The result of these endless pursuits seemed a hitherto unknown revela-
tion of microcosmic life in all its facets. Those working within the classical
tenets thoroughly disapproved. Lairesse censured: ‘We often hear with
wonder that painters persuade one another that. . .it is enough to follow
nature [These painters] imitate life just as they see it, without any
difference [Whereas a painter should paint nature] not as it ordinarily
appears, but as it ought to be in its greatest perfection.’ 1 But in fact far
from adhering to nature ‘as they see it’, these Dutch painters were tied to
tradition in a thousand different ways. It should never be forgotten that
vision is a compound of ideas, concepts, and traditions deposited in our
minds and that pure vision and pure portrayals of vision must be regarded
as a popular legend. It clearly follows that the Dutch painters too were
fenced in by limitations which are briefly and efficiently described as
‘style’.
1 Het Groot Schilderboek (Amsterdam, 1707). The above digest from the English edition.
The Art of Painting (London, 1778), p. 100.
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Pieter de Hooch’s career may be considered as an example for many.
His early, Baroque phase characterised by strong chiaroscuro is connected
with the circle of Frans Hals, with Palamedesz and Codde. Under the
influence of Rembrandt’s pupil Carel Fabritius (1622-54) and of
Vermeer his pictures during his ‘classical’ phase, the decade 1655-65,
have a warm and luminous quality. At this time he produced the masterly
interiors with domestic scenes for which he is famed. All these works are
as firmly and as solidly constructed as any Renaissance picture. A checker-
board floor parallel to the picture plane defines the space, and the compo-
sition in depth, the vista through doorways and yards is also arranged in
parallel layers. Each figure of the seemingly incidental groups is firmly
anchored in the picture by significant spatial co-ordinates. But now a
number of pictorial devices are used to produce the impression of life ‘ as
it ordinarily appears’. The artist always chooses a close viewpoint (for
which there was a long tradition in Dutch painting), so that the picture is
not relegated to an ideal sphere but draws the beholder forcefully into it.
Other contrivances such as the off-centre vanishing point and the placing
of the incident in one corner of the room add to the impression of casual
life. Later in the i66o’s and in the 1670’s there follows an ‘academic’
phase under French influence: the compositions harden, the handling
becomes facile, the tonality cool, fashionable groups and elegant anec-
dotes replace the domestic scenes. This development echoes three social
phases: the heroic age following the wars of liberation, the comparatively
peaceful phase of the thriving Dutch bourgeoisie, and the aristocratisation
of society under the shadow of Louis XIV’s supremacy.
Certain aspects of de Hooch’s development may safely be generalised.
Thus between the 1640’s and 1660’s emphasis is laid on middle-class
homeliness. From then on preference is given to the rendering of polite
society that follows the dictate of etiquette. Terborch, Metsu and
Hoogstraten illustrate this current. Frans van Mieris (1635-81) and
Godfried Schalcken (1643-1706) amplify the cool, hard, and precious
character of the works of their teacher, Gerard Dou. Caspar Netscher
(1639-84), Terborch’s pupil, specialised in painting idealised persons clad
in costly materials. Bega’s pictures show that even the popular genre lost
its rough conviviality.
Such observations can easily be supplemented by others. At the
beginning of his career, Cuyp shows the warm palette of Rembrandt’s
middle period. Later his palette cools and the structure of his landscapes
becomes increasingly classical. Hobbema’s work appears thin and dis-
jointed compared with the density and cohesion of Ruisdael’s landscapes.
Even Rembrandt’s pupils perform the stylistic gyration. Nicolaes Maes
(1632-93) is perhaps the most conspicuous case. A close follower of the
master in the 1650’s, he changed completely in the 1660’s to painting
portraits of high society in noble attitudes and with a palette of light
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broken tones. Finally, it must be said that even the great Vermeer did not
work outside the pale. His early pictures reveal connections with the
Italian Baroque (for example, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha,
1 654/5; Edinburgh). Between the later i650’s and the mid-i66o’s, when
he is most his own, his compositions are of an infinite simplicity and the
velvety luminosity of his palette is insuperable. But already the Love
Letter of about 1666 (Amsterdam) shows a peculiar disruption of the
pictorial space and a frigid polish. The intensity of his vision slackened in
accord with the temper of the time.
Compared with the magnificent flowering of painting, the sister arts in
both parts of the Netherlands were less important; but while the south
witnessed a rich development of Baroque architecture and sculpture, the
north had little demand for sculptural decorations in churches and
public buildings and, moreover, soon turned against the boisterous style
in architecture closely associated with the Catholic Restoration. Even
before the middle of the century Jacob van Campen (1595-1657) and
Pieter Post (1608-69) revolutionised Dutch architecture by introducing an
austere, puritanical classicism, the greatest monument of which was
van Campen’s Town Hall in Amsterdam (1648-55). The third great
architect of the period. Philips Vingboons (1608-75), tended towards a
more elegant French interpretation of the style.
The imposing southern churches of that time belong to another world.
They strike the beholder as being closely tied to the Roman Baroque; but
they also contain French features, and their rich, heavy-handed decoration
has roots in the native tradition. Willem Hessius’s (1601-90) Jesuit church,
St Michel at Louvain (1650-71), Luc Fayd’herbe’s (1617-97) churches, of
which the unconventional Notre-Dame d’Hanswyck at Mechlin may be
singled out, and the fagade of the Beguinage church in Brussels (1657-76)
by an unknown architect, are splendid examples of the style. The row of
narrow, high houses with their profusion of miscellaneous decoration on
the marvellous Grand’ Place in Brussels (1696-9) reveals how completely
domestic architecture preserved its local flavour.
Sculptural activity in the south was to a considerable extent in the
hands of a few productive families among whom the Duquesnoy, Quellin
and Verbruggen are the most important. Less influenced by French
sculpture than one would expect, they blended in various ways Bernini’s
Italian Baroque with Rubens’s Flemish realism. None came closer to
translating Rubens into the plastic medium than Luc Fayd’herbe who
educated a large school. The extremely productive Jean Delcour (1627-
1707), by contrast, adhered to the style of the Bernini succession. The
dearth of sculptors in Holland resulted in Artus Quellin the Elder (1609-
68) being commissioned with the extensive decoration of the Amsterdam
Town Hall, the largest task of this kind in Holland. Among his assistants
was the Dutchman Rombout Verhulst (1624-96) who, together with
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Willem de Keyser, was responsible for the overloaded, unaccentuated
tomb of Admiral Tromp (Oude Kerk, Delft; 1655-8), the prototype of
many Dutch tombs of the second half of the century. Verhulst was the
most influential Baroque sculptor in Holland, but his style and that of his
successors must be regarded as a dispassionate branch of the more vital
Belgian school.
The position of the arts in England was very different from that
prevailing in the Low Countries and France. The Restoration produced
neither a splendid court patronage and an authoritative court style after
the French model, nor a broad bourgeois public with artistic interests as
in Holland. Patronage of the arts was taken in hand by the nobility and
gentry, whose taste was far from sophisticated. The Civil War and
Commonwealth were in fact derogatory to a continuation of the refined
artistic interests which had centred in the court of Charles I. Twenty-five
years after the Restoration, William Aglionby, the author of a book on
painting, assessed the repercussions of the broken thread in these words:
‘Our Nobility and Gentry, except some few, who have eminently showed
their Kindness for this noble Art, they are generally speaking no Judges,
and therefore can be no Promoters of an Art that lies all in nice Observa-
tions ’, and lamented ‘that of all the Civilized Nations in Europe we are
the only that want Curiosity for Artists’. 1
In spite of such unfavourable prospects, there was one architect of far
more than insular importance. Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723). He
had begun as a scientist. As early as 1657 he had been appointed Professor
of Astronomy at Gresham College, London, and in 1661 Savilian
Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. He was one of the founder members
of the Royal Society 2 and never lost interest in scientific affairs. At the
age of thirty he made his first somewhat amateurish architectural designs.
His great opportunity came after the Fire of London (1666) when wide
scope was offered to his inexhaustible creative energy. In 1669 he was
appointed Surveyor-General, and the rebuilding of the destroyed churches
and of St Paul’s as well as the maintenance and construction of royal
residences and public buildings fell to him. Between 1670 and the 1690’s
he partially or wholly rebuilt no less than fifty-five London churches of
which thirty-four survived up to the Blitz of 1940. Many of these churches
are bold essays in centralised planning (St Stephen Walbrook, 1672-87;
St Swithin, 1677-85; St Mary Abchurch, 1681-6) and, although his
repertory of forms is conventional, the structural principles are often new
and have hardly their equal on the Continent.
Wren’s greatest achievement and one of the finest post-Renaissance
buildings in Europe is St Paul’s Cathedral (1675-1710), crowned by a
masterful dome which still dominates the silhouette of the city. The
1 Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues (London, 1685). 2 See above, ch. ill, pp. 50-1.
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building of the cathedral taxed Wren’s ingenuity for several decades and
hundreds of drawings bear witness to the many revisions which the plan
as well as every detail underwent in the course of time. Thus the slow
growth of the design reveals an empirical approach to architecture which
reflects the spirit of the Royal Society. The same empirical, rational and
anti-authoritarian spirit informed what may be called Wren’s arbitrary
use of the current architectural vocabulary. He incorporated in his design
motifs from Serlio and Inigo Jones, Palladio and Bernini, Bramante and
Michelangelo, Pietro da Cortona and Borromini, Hardouin-Mansart and
many others ; but the result is a homogeneous work, the cool reserve of which
exactly parallels the Late Baroque classicism in vogue on the Continent.
Compared with St Paul’s and the city churches most of the other Wren
buildings shrink in significance. Winchester Palace erected for Charles II
(1683-85) no longer exists; the magnificent plans for Whitehall Palace,
made after the fire of 1698, remained on paper; Hampton Court Palace
(begun 1689), an adaptation and enlargement of Cardinal Wolsey’s house
to serve as residence for William and Mary, is Wren’s least successful
creation. But the grand design for Greenwich Hospital vies with his
ecclesiastical work. Queen Mary sponsored the erection of a hospital for
seamen as a counterpart to the Royal Hospital for soldiers at Chelsea
which Wren had built between 1682 and 1691. The palace which John
Webb, Inigo Jones’s pupil, had constructed for Charles II (1663-9) on the
bank of the Thames was to form part of the design. Wren devised a noble
layout with two successive narrowing piazzas axially orientated towards
Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House which concludes the vista. This stately
design, one of the most ambitious in seventeenth-century England, began
to take shape in 1694. Its pretentious size owes not a little to Versailles,
while the two long colonnades and the two high domed structures facing
each other take up and transmute problems first considered in the piazzas
of St Peter’s and del Popolo in Rome.
Wren’s work entirely dominates this period. Next to him Sir Roger
Pratt (1620-85), a gentleman architect, may be mentioned, for he created
the prototype of the Restoration country house at Coleshill, Berkshire
(1649-62; destroyed 1952), a massive and imposing structure, less classical
and more insular than Inigo Jones’s buildings during the Caroline era.
Hugh May (1622-84), an intimate of Pepys and Evelyn, orientated him-
self towards Dutch classicism. Eltham Lodge, Kent (1663-4), his finest
work, might almost have been erected in Holland. The younger William
Talman (1650-1719) is noteworthy for the monumental south front at
Chatsworth, the palatial house of the Duke of Devonshire in Derbyshire,
to which he contributed in various ways between 1687 and 1696. Talman’s
later work was overshadowed by the great architects Nicholas Hawks-
moor (1661-1736) and John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), whose association
began at Castle Howard, Yorkshire, just before the turn of the century.
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It was they who for the next two decades replaced Wren’s unemotional
manner by an unorthodox, massive, and emotionally stirring style with
conspicuous Baroque idiosyncrasies.
No British sculptor of the period can lay claim to great distinction.
John Bushnell (c. 1630-1701), who studied in France and Rome and
worked for years in Venice, practised an insipid form of Italian Late
Baroque in England. Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700) left a rare
example of elaborate Baroque allegory in the grand manner in his relief at
the base of the Monument, London (1674). Late in his life he gave proof
of considerable accomplishment at both Hampton Court and St Paul’s.
Edward Pierce (c. 1630-95) has to his credit a few busts of exceptional
quality, the finest of which, that of Wren (1673; Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford) shows an intimacy and directness of approach reminiscent of
Coysevox. Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721), finally, excelled as a wood-
carver of great technical skill. The realism of his ‘ inhabited ’ garlands and
hangings shows him strongly influenced by Low Country sculpture.
In contrast to the continental position in both Catholic and Protestant
countries, English painting was essentially focused on portraiture. Such
mediocre practitioners as Robert Walker (c. 1605-c. 1685) and Isaac
Fuller (c. 1605-72) kept the Van Dyck tradition alive after the master’s
death in 1641. But already during the Commonwealth Peter Lely from
Soest in Westphalia (1618-80) emerged as the foremost painter in
England. His stature in the reigns of Charles II and James II can only be
compared with Van Dyck’s in the reign of Charles I; but his fashionable
portraits, ably painted in the international facile and affected style, entirely
lack Van Dyck’s warmth, genius and depth of characterisation. Lely
mapped out the path of English portraiture for a long time to come. Sir
Godfrey Kneller (1646/9-1723) from Liibeck, who had studied in
Amsterdam under Rembrandt’s pupil Ferdinand Bol, settled in England
in 1674 and became the heir to the Lely empire. A painter of considerable
talent, he degraded his profession by innumerable glib portraits which
he turned out from his ‘streamlined’ studio.
Most other branches of painting were also practised by foreigners who
made England their home for longer or shorter periods. The allegorical
fresco in the grand manner was championed by the Italian Antonio
Verrio (c. 1639-1707) from the mid- 1670’s onwards and by the French-
man Louis Laguerre (1663-1721), Lebrun’s pupil, who appeared in
England in 1683/4. Marine painting was introduced by the Dutchman
Willem van de Velde (1611-93) and his son, Willem the Younger (1633—
1707). The topographical landscape had able representatives in the
Bohemian Wenceslas Hollar (1607-77), the Dutchman Leonard Knyff
(1650-1721), and the Fleming Jan Siberechts (1627-c. 1698). It was not
till the second quarter of the eighteenth century that a native British
school of painting of extraordinary vitality arose.
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The devastations of the Thirty Years War led to a rupture of artistic
activity in Germany, and the process of recuperation was very slow. Since
the autonomous development of the arts had for so long been strangled,
Germans became dependent on foreign artists and foreign training. The
Catholic south tended towards Italy, and the Protestant north towards
Holland. Thus the mediocre Joachim Sandrart (1606-88) from Frankfurt,
well known through his contemporary history of artists, the Teutsche
Academie (Nuremberg, 1675), and the more interesting Heinrich Schon-
feld (1609-75), who was mainly active in Augsburg, spent years of their
lives in Italy; on the other hand, Jurgen Ovens from Slesvig (1623-79) and
Michael Leopold Willmann from Konigsberg (1630-1706) received their
training in Holland and in their work sentimentalised Van Dyck and
Rembrandt. Such rather philistine painters hardly foreshadowed the
wonderful flowering of the Baroque fresco in Germany and Austria after
1700 : the measure of independence, creative richness, imaginative freedom
and visionary depth achieved by painters like Johann Michael Rottmayr
(1654-1730), Cosmas Damian Asam (1686-1739) and scores of others.
Italian sculptors, stucco workers, and architects, not always of the first
rank, had a considerable share in the German and Austrian production of
the later seventeenth century ; but from about 1660 native sculptors appear
in fair numbers working in an Italianate Late Baroque or, on occasions,
carrying on an indigenous tradition stemming from the late Gothic.
Balthasar Permoser (1651-1732), outstanding among them, had a typical
curriculum. Before becoming court sculptor in Dresden (1689), he spent
many years in Italy and his work is permeated with recollections of
Bernini, Puget, and the Venetian Baroque. Unexpectedly, Germany had
in Andreas Schliiter (1664-1714) a Late Baroque sculptor of truly inter-
national format, and it is even stranger that he was a North German. In
1694 he was appointed court sculptor in Berlin. His masterpiece, the
equestrian statue of the Great Elector (1692-1703), holds its own next to
the great equestrian statues of all time. Stylistically it is orientated
towards Italian Late Baroque movement rather than towards French
classicism. Like German painting, German sculpture had a golden age in
the new century. This is true mainly of Bavaria and the districts along the
Danube. Sculptors now replaced Permoser’s and Schluter’s international
Baroque by an ecstatic, graceful, and sometimes even effeminate style of
a distinctly native character.
Palace and church architecture, too, was at first almost entirely in the
hands of Italians. St Cajetan, the Theatine church in Munich, the most
imposing post-war structure, was begun by Agostino Barelli in 1663 after
the model of S. Andrea della Valle in Rome and continued by Enrico
Zuccalli after 1675. And when the Germans came into their own with
Johann Dientzenhofer’s cathedral at Fulda (1704-12), they first adhered
to the Italian tradition. Barelli also began the palace at Nymphenburg
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near Munich (1663), and Lorenzo Bedogni and Girolamo Sartorio the
palace at Herrenhausen near Hanover (1665), while Zuccalli designed the
palace at Schleissheim near Munich (1701). Vienna lived under the
shadow of the Infidel until the siege of 1683. 1 It was only after that date
that a magnificent era of reconstruction began. This task was mainly in
the hands of two men of genius, Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723) and
Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt (1668-1745); innumerable gifted archi-
tects brought about the most brilliant architectural revival Germany and
Austria had known since the Middle Ages.
While England, Germany and Austria developed into flourishing art
centres at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Low Countries and
Spain saw no such renaissance. In neither case can the decline be dis-
sociated from political and economic calamities. After the great first half
of the seventeenth century the degeneration of painting in Spain was rapid
and irrevocable. To be sure, throughout the second half painters of con-
siderable talent were still at work. The reign of the last Habsburg king,
Charles II (1665-1700), marks the culmination of national decay. His
court painter, Don Juan Carreno de Miranda (1614-85), was but a feeble
counterfeit of Philip IV’s court painter Velasquez. With Claudio Coello
(1642-93), Carreno’s successor, the Madrid School came to an end.
The course of events in other Spanish art centres was not much
different. In Valencia painting died with Ribalta’s pupil, Jeronimo
Jacinto Espinosa (1600-80). Granada had her last practitioners of con-
siderable stature in the talented Alonso Cano (1601-67), painter, sculptor
and architect, in Pedro de Moya (1610-66), and Juan de Sevilla (1643—
95). Next to Zurbaran’s pupil, Antonio del Castillo y Saavedra (1616-68),
no name need be mentioned in Cordoba. Seville had a flourishing school
during the seventeenth century headed by Bartolomd Esteban Murillo
(1618-82). While some minor pupils carried Murillo’s manner over into
the eighteenth century, the death of the temperamental Juan de Valdes
Leal (1622-91), a slipshod craftsman but a highly gifted colourist,
brought to an end the great tradition of the Seville School.
All these painters turned Velasquez’s and Zurbaran’s sturdy and
statuesque realism into a refined, sophisticated and, on occasion, agitated
and confused manner, and replaced the compelling directness of the older
masters by a virtuosity which often strikes the beholder as melodramatic,
slick and insincere. Murillo, the greatest of this group, famed for his
many pictures of the Immaculate Conception, developed, according to
Spanish terminology, from a cool to a warm, and finally to a vaporous
style; these terms indicate the course which his art took between the
1640’s and his death in 1682. The muffled colours and forms and the
sentimentality of his late style are characteristic of Spanish painting in the
1 See below, ch. xxi, pp. 515-17.
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last decades of the century. By and large, the general trend of the develop-
ment in Spain parallels that in the rest of Europe.
Just as the most effusive decorations in Italy belong to the Late Baroque,
just as France has nothing to offer that compares in splendour with the
Galerie des Glaces, so Spain, during the last years of the old dynasty,
began to turn to a boisterous and passionate decorative style of unex-
pected originality. In contrast to Spanish painting, the Spanish architecture
of the seventeenth century was rather barren. Few buildings compare in
grandeur and eccentricity with Cano’s facade of Granada cathedral
(1664). For centuries the Spanish Church had focused special attention
on the high altar and the retable or altar screen, and it is here that the
Spanish Late Baroque excelled. Richly ornate designs appear soon after
1650; from then all the three arts combine in producing fascinating
Baroque works. Bernardo Simon de Pineda’s high altar of the Caridad,
Seville (1670-3), Jose Benito Churriguera’s (1665-1725) retables in such
churches as Segovia cathedral (1686-90) and San Esteban at Salamanca
(1693-6) are polychrome structures of huge dimensions, vigorously
organised by corkscrew columns spun over with decoration and peopled
with lively statuary. The vast majority of the architectural and decorative
work of these innovators, among whom besides the Churriguera family
artists such as Leonardo de Figueroa (c. 1650-1730), Pedro de Ribera
(c. 1683-1742), Narciso Tome (d. 1742), and, above all, Francisco Hurtado
(1669-1725) must be counted, belong to the first decades of the eighteenth
century. The most fascinating monument of this style is the exuberantly
decorated Sacristy of the Cartuja of Granada (1713-47) which has
inconclusively been attributed to Hurtado.
Sculptors of this period gave their best in ecstatic polychrome figures of
saints in which Spanish mysticism and naturalism are wedded. Pedro de
Mena’s (1628-88) St Francis in Toledo cathedral (1663) is the principal
example. It is a characteristic sign of the time that in the work of his
successor, Jose de Mora (1642-1724), the rendering of rapture appears
more rhetorical and precious (St Bruno, Granada).
Towards the end of the seventeenth century the international classicism
to a large extent imposed by the French Academy lost its attraction. A
new spirit, anti-dogmatic, vigorous and enthusiastic, and at the same time
distinctly national, becomes discernible in many places: witness the sud-
den marvellous ascendancy of Venetian painting, the rich and elegant
Baroque decorations in Genoa, the rise of a luxuriant architecture in
Sicily, the unexpected bloom of a typically German and Austrian Baroque,
the turn to a virile and dramatic Baroque architecture in England, the
exuberance of the decorative style in Spain, and, above all, the Baroque
freedom aspired to by the generation of Coysevox, Permoser and Schliiter.
All these roughly contemporary events have a distinct physiognomy of
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their own, formed by national and local idiosyncrasies, and seem there-
fore unconnected. None the less, fertile ideas always had an irresistible
capacity of transmission. The new approach started, it may be claimed, in
the stronghold of academic indoctrination, in Paris herself; that it had
intra-European reverberations cannot therefore be doubted.
The first move lay with Roger de Piles, a Paris art theoretician (1635—
1709), who in 1673 published his Dialogue sur le colons which had the
effect of a bombshell, for he maintained that Poussin, the idol of the
Academy, was a failure as a colourist. He exalted Rubens, the master of
the great Baroque sweep and the colourist par excellence, at the expense
of Poussin. A heated controversy ensued between the supporters of
Poussin and of Rubens, the ‘Poussinists’ and the ‘Rubenists’ as they were
called. Worse was to come. In his Conversations sur la couleur of 1677
de Piles turned against the authority of classical antiquity itself. He main-
tained that the close adherence to ancient models had ruined Poussin.
Before the end of the century the controversy had been decided in
de Piles’s favour. His friend, the painter Charles de La Fosse (1636-
1716), a determined ‘Rubenist’, was elected Director of the Academy. So
the artists themselves discredited the classical dogma and the way was open
for the free development of French painting in the early eighteenth century.
Roger de Piles was capable of verbalising the problems that beset
young artists of his day ; he thus helped to prepare a conscious resurgence
of a Baroque wave after the generation’s fervent belief in the eternal
values of the classical ideology. His sally against the infallibility of the
Academy has another important aspect: de Piles opened the flood-gates
of lay criticism. The position in Paris was unparalleled, for the French
capital was not only the seat of the most powerful centralised government,
but saw also the growth of a well educated and well informed middle class
with a passionate interest in matters of art. This sensitive public began to
enjoy discussion and controversy, and it had its own ideas about the pur-
pose of art. An anti-rationalist tendency made its entry, for, in contrast
to the principles of the Academy, the public demanded that art should
please rather than instruct and should appeal to the emotions rather than
to the reasoning faculties. Like the classical theory, this new position too
had been prepared in Italy. It was the painter Pietro da Cortona and the
Jesuit Ottonelli who, in their Treatise on Painting (1652), strongly advo-
cated for the first time the hedonistic principle of delight as the purpose
of painting. The inevitable sequel happened in Paris: in his Reflexions
critiques sur la podsie et la peinture (1719) the Abbd du Bos enthroned the
educated public, the art enthusiasts, as supreme judges in matters of art.
Thus the late seventeenth century saw conditions arise in the relation of
artists and public which had a momentous influence on the arts of the
eighteenth century and, in a broader perspective, even on those of modern
times.
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THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF STATES
T he last fifty years of the seventeenth century were so eventful and
saw such alterations in the outward appearance of western and
central European life that prima facie this may be regarded as a
significant period in the development of social classes and in the related
development of institutions. This presumption may be tested by tracing
some of the major changes and their connections, and it will be convenient
to begin with the most obvious, the changes in the social aspects of war.
It has been written, and it may be accepted as established, that from
somewhere about 1560 to somewhere about 1660 Europe underwent a
‘military revolution’. 1 Armament, tactics and strategy had changed. They
now required new kinds of discipline, a new organisation of fleets and
standing armies, new and more intensive applications of technical and
general knowledge. The financial and administrative machinery of supply,
the systems of political control and the social composition of the armed
forces were all remodelled.
The effects of the military revolution were shown by a salient fact of
social history : armies and fleets were much larger than before. Leaving
out of account the armies of the Turks, we may say that the largest force
ever previously united under a single command had been the 175,000 men
under the orders of Gustavus Adolphus in 1632, but this was a momen-
tary combination which was not maintained, whereas, in his navy and his
army, Louis XIV kept more than double that number in service for years
together. There were some countries, such as Spain, which were unable to
enrol as many men as they had done before; but there were new military
powers, such as Brandenburg-Prussia, which had 2000 men after it made
peace in 1640 and 30,000 when it was at peace in 1688. For some of the
powers naval armaments were not a standing necessity like land-arma-
ments; but the fleets of Europe also increased. The general total of men
under arms was much greater, and the increase was permanent. There
have been further increases, but there has never been a general decline.
Although the population of Europe was growing, and the countries where
it diminished were exceptional, these armies and fleets were not only
larger but they absorbed a larger proportion of the populations from
which they were drawn.
These facts have been cited in support of the theory that war is primarily
a means by which society is relieved from the excessive pressure of rising
1 By Professor Michael Roberts in his inaugural lecture The Military Revolution (s.a.,
published at Belfast in 1956).
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population. Sociologists who accept this view have described war as
deferred infanticide and have tried to prove by statistics that in certain
periods the numbers of deaths resulting from war vary inversely with the
rates of infant mortality. They hold that an excessively growing population
builds up an explosive structure. As applied to this period the theory
begins with the probably correct diagnosis that the total European popu-
lation was increasing and pressing on the means of subsistence. In
France, for instance, it is believed to have risen steadily from about 1600.
There was some emigration, including that of the Huguenots, but from
1666 onwards Colbert legislated for the encouragement of early marriages
and large families. In 1678-88 France was more populous than ever
before. The slaughter and famines of 1688-1714 brought a reduction of
perhaps more than 5 per cent, and no comparable explosive instability
recurred until the late eighteenth century.
In the present state of knowledge regarding demographic facts it must
be objected that little of this interpretation is capable of proof. For
France and also for the other countries, the primary data on which con-
temporaries and nineteenth-century demographers relied — parish registers,
taxation returns and the like — were defective, and even now critical study
in this field has barely begun. 1 There is no reason to suppose that the
measures of Colbert had any effect worth mentioning. Even if they had,
their effect on the total population of the country, irrespective of occupa-
tions and age-groups, would not necessarily throw light on the causation
of wars. Recruiting did not simply mean the withdrawal of a proportion
of all French men of military age for the armed forces. It was in the main
restricted to the less skilled and less firmly settled men ; it was still almost
entirely voluntary, except for the ‘ recruiting-sergeant ’ Hunger ; and it was
international. The French army included Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irish-
men, Germans, Spaniards and Swiss. The armies opposed to it were
equally composite. If all the facts come to be investigated it may prove
that France alone had an explosive demographic situation. Such a con-
clusion might well have a bearing on the differences of opinion as to the
relative aggressiveness of the Powers; but at present it cannot be justified.
For Europe in general it has not been shown that the growth of armies
absorbed the available supplies of men, nor that the pressure of numbers
drove men to the colours. There is much evidence to indicate that govern-
ments were hard put to it to enrol their reluctant subjects ; and there is also
much to indicate that they reached the limits of their capacity to provide
arms, munitions, ships, equipment, transport, rations and pay.
Demographic information can do little by itself to explain either the
1 See P. Goubert (‘Les registres paroissiaux’ in Annales, vol. ix (1954)) who considers
that information from this source only becomes good about 1730. Little is known about
changes in the expectation of life, and consequently in the proportion of men of military
age to total population, in any country in the seventeenth century.
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causation of wars or the size of armies in this period; nor is it to be
expected that it will do more than help to block out some of the conditions
under which multiple social forces operated. The explosive structure which
precedes the detonation of a war is a structure of the whole society, just as
war is an activity of many elements in society. The military revolution was
a complex of changes each of which had its part in a reciprocal interaction
of causes and consequences extending throughout the life of society.
Unless and until some new analysis resolves it into simpler components
we may specify this revolution as one of the factors of change. Among the
others the easiest to recognise are the economic factors. This period fell
within the age during which capitalism was spreading through Europe.
Different systems of law in relation to the family, status and heredity,
along with different constitutional systems, crossed and complicated the
working of economic factors, but in itself the system of private property
was a perpetual source of change, if only because, when men are free to
do what they like with their own, some of them will make money and some
will lose it. As we have seen, broadly speaking, Europe was growing more
populous. Again speaking broadly, it was growing richer. At any rate in
most countries the higher strata of society collectively disposed of greater
wealth and the States commanded greater resources for the purposes of
war. About the fortunes of the peasants, labourers and artisans it is
harder to generalise because, even apart from the disturbances of war,
there were wide divergences between different localities. Interpenetrating
with these economic factors were others of which one in particular was
characteristic of the period. This was the movement of thought which is
commonly referred to as the scientific movement . 1
Among the social effects of the scientific movement the easiest to trace
are those which it produced through improvements in technology, that is
in industry, transport, agriculture and warfare. It also had direct effects
in government and social organisation. These are often difficult to trace
because the results of applying scientific habits of mind in such matters are
much the same as those of applying common sense. The scientific move-
ment itself was not by any means confined to natural science, and within
natural science the distinction, real or unreal, between ‘ pure ’ and ‘ applied ’
had scarcely crystallised from undifferentiated ‘natural knowledge ’. 2 In
the widest sense the movement was a tidal wave of efficient thinking, and
its results resembled those of the efficiency of men of action. The deter-
mination to govern well existed quite independently of astronomy, which
served to improve navigation, or metallurgy or chemistry, which were of
some use in industry, though not yet in agriculture. In comparison with
1 See ch. in, above.
8 It was explicitly with reference to mathematics that Dr Johnson wrote in The Rambler,
no. 14 (1750), p. 5, about ‘the difference between pure science, which has to do only with
ideas, and the application of its laws to the use of life’. Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (London,
1 728), 1, ii, distinguishes ‘ Natural and Scientifical ’ from ‘Artificial and Technical ’ knowledge.
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this practical determination the attempts to formulate scientific principles
of human nature and society had negligible, or at least scarcely traceable,
results; but they did make a contribution, and there is one sphere where
these results can be seen clearly. This is the sphere of mathematics, then
the most precise and the most progressive of all studies. In mathematics
the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ was already familiar, 1 and it
now came to be understood that mixed mathematics included social as
well as technological applications.
The simplest example of a suggestion for improving administration by
directly applying mathematical knowledge is that of John de Witt’s
proposed reform of life-annuities. For centuries public authorities in the
Netherlands had raised loans in return for which they made annual pay-
ments for the lifetime of the lenders: the town of Tournay is known to
have done so in 1229. Since they did not know how long any of the
lenders would live, they could not foresee how much would have to be
paid out by way of annuities in any future year. The whole proceeding
was speculative. By the middle of the seventeenth century, when then-
great wars began, the Estates of Holland were beginning to apply rational
financial technique to their borrowing, and in 1655 they converted some
of their loans to take advantage of a lower rate of interest. They had,
however, no figures on which to base a bargain of this kind with their
life-annuitants. About that time mathematicians discovered from the new
study of the laws of probability how to calculate the chances of death and
survival. In 1669 this idea was discussed in private letters between the
great Christiaan Huygens and his brother. Whether it came round to John
de Witt from either of them is not known; he may have hit upon it
independently; at any rate in 1671 in a memorandum which became justly
famous he laid it before his masters, the Estates of Holland. This reached
the conclusion that with the rate of interest at 4 per cent a life-annuity at
sixteen years’ purchase was an advantageous investment. It is not to be
supposed that the members of the Estates could follow the calculation.
Their pensionary took the precaution of annexing to it a supporting dec-
laration by Johannes Hudde, a mathematician who was a member of the
Amsterdam municipal council and later became burgomaster there.
From that beginning actuarial science grew rapidly and spread widely
in public finance and private insurance business. 2
There was indeed still no true statistical basis for de Witt’s figures for
the expectation of life. The first tolerably good life-table was calculated
from the data of mortality in Breslau by Edmond Halley in 1693. Nor
did the new principle carry all before it. In the same year, 1693, the
1 See, for instance, J. Wilkins, Mathematical l Magick (London, 1648), Dedication and
PP- 95-7-
2 The memorandum was published in Amsterdam. There is a French translation by
P. J. L. de Chateleux, with commentary, he rapport de Johan de Witt sur le calcul des rentes
viageres (The Hague, 1937).
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English government, needing money badly for purposes of war, sold life-
annuities of 14 per cent, and two years later it invited annuitants to
convert their annuities into an ‘estate’ for 96 years at the low rate of
4} years purchase. In neither case did it make any distinction for age. In
Holland as late as 1810 the municipality of The Hague sold life-annuities
at a rate which did not vary with the ages of the persons during whose
survival they were payable. When Halley calculated his life-table, how-
ever, educated opinion had accepted the idea that mathematics as applied
to government could form a regular department of knowledge. In the
i65o’s Sir William Petty was employed in constructing maps and tables
for the allocation of land in Ireland. From this work on the ground he
moved to wider reasonings, and he invented phrases which claimed that
these were at least analogous to scientific thinking. In 1672 he wrote of
‘political survey’ and (having at one time taught human anatomy in
Oxford) in 1691 he published his Political Anatomy of Ireland. A third
phrase, which he used in the title of a book published in 1683, ‘political
arithmetic’, passed into general currency. English governments did what
they could to use statistics. The two spheres in which they hoped for
valuable results were vital statistics and trade statistics, the two spheres in
which governments can most easily collect large bodies of numerical facts.
In vital statistics they made little or no progress, and none could well be
made until the institution of a periodic national census, which came much
later. In commercial statistics they did better. In 1696, at a time of war
and financial crisis, they inaugurated the first statistical office successfully
conducted by any western European State, that of the inspector-general of
imports and exports. Commercial figures prepared in this office were used
in parliamentary discussions and in negotiations with foreign powers; but
the officials who handled them knew that they were defective and,
throughout most of the eighteenth century, political arithmetic remained
more an aspiration and a programme than an effective element in the
practice of States.
The comprehensive and systematic collection of facts, the method of
survey, was not a private invention of Sir William Petty but a favourite
method of social inquiry at that time. One of its instruments was the
questionnaire. In England the Royal Society drew up a list of headings
under which travellers abroad should collect scientific information. Some
of its early members reported as others had done before them on the
resources of countries overseas, combining scientific with economic
observations. In France science was harnessed more closely to govern-
ment than in England. The Academie des Sciences was an essential organ
of the official work of Colbert; and it devoted much attention to tech-
nology. Although it did not intrude on State concerns, there is an affinity
between some of its work and some of the new methods of administration.
Colbert’s method of government was to submit the results of inquiry to the
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adjudication of common sense. He had ‘ un desir insatiable d’apprendre’. 1
In 1663 officials were instructed to begin a thorough inquest into the
condition of the country. They were to collect all the available maps and,
if necessary, have them corrected, to report on finance, economic resources
and activities, taxation and everything — military, ecclesiastical and miscel-
laneous — that could possibly concern the government. In subsequent years
Colbert and his subordinates used and improved statistics, cartography
and books of reference. The Bibliotheque Royale was one of his creations,
and he paid attention to the classification of archives. Like the English
scientists he insisted on the use of a clear prose style.
The policy which was based on Colbert’s inquiries was settled and put
into operation by efficient machinery. A small number of ministers in close
touch with the sovereign gave orders to a well-chosen body of local
administrators. The intendants were intelligent and energetic; they had the
full strength of the State behind them. France moved in the direction that
Colbert desired, and, no doubt, if it had remained at peace it would have
moved in the same direction to greater prosperity. But, like political
arithmetic in England, Colbertism remained an unfulfilled programme,
and there were other reasons for this besides the wars. The survey of 1663,
which was meant to be the work of a few months, was never completed.
In 1697 the due de Beauvillier submitted an almost identical questionnaire
to the intendants, who were to draw up memoranda on their generality
for the instruction of the king’s grandson, the due de Bourgogne. This
was in the second period of Louis’s reign, the period of unsuccessful wars,
and Beauvillier belonged to a group of eminent men who were critical of
the government. The greatest of them was Vauban, marshal of France,
who had made his name as a military engineer, and advanced like Petty
from actual survey and map-making to ideas about taxation and govern-
ment. But the position of Colbert and those who thought with him a
generation earlier was not fundamentally different. He was a powerful
minister but he too was a reformer; he represented a spirit which was
incompatible with that of many established institutions. The rational
administration of the new ministerial departments was imposed upon a
social and political organism which not only survived but continued to
grow and to create fresh embodiments of its own principles.
There is indeed an obvious contradiction between the king’s functions
of government and his position as the symbolic head of the nation and its
traditions. Historians no longer believe that Louis said ‘ L’etat e’est moi ’ ;
but that was the position ascribed to him both by his extreme admirers
and by his extreme opponents. Bossuet wrote : ‘ tout l’fitat est en lui \ 2 and
1 When the Abbe de Choisy wrote of this and his ‘application infinie’ that they ‘lui
tenaient lieu de science’, he meant knowledge generally, not scientific knowledge: Memoires
(Utrecht, 1727), 1, 115.
8 Politique tiree des propres paroles de 1' Venture Sainte (Paris, 1 709), Bk . v, art. iv, prop. 1 .
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
the most famous of Huguenot political pamphlets concurred : ‘ Le Roi a
pris la place de 1 ’lStat’. 1 The official theory of absolutism did not indeed
exaggerate the part played by the king in the daily work of government,
and it was written on his behalf that: ‘La fonction des rois consiste
principalement a laisser agir le bon sens, qui agit toujours naturellement
sans peine’ ; 2 but something like deception was practised to make it appear
that everything turned on his will and his application to affairs. The four
secretaries of the king’s cabinet had important functions. The most
influential of them avait la plume : he was authorised to counterfeit the
king’s signature, and he did it so well that no one could tell whether he or
his master had written. The king devoted some of his time to empty
routine, as when he checked the three financial registers in council once a
month. The controleur general read the figures aloud, and after each entry
the king enunciated the syllable ‘ bon There were other rulers in Europe
who were more industrious and more truly men of business than Louis,
and his attention to duty, although it was genuine, made less impression
in France and outside it than his conspicuous expenditure.
In the Memoires which were put together in his name there are some
famous reflections on display as a method of winning popularity for a
monarch. People judge what they do not see by what they see. Expendi-
ture which may appear extravagant makes a very advantageous impression
on the populace of magnificence, power, wealth and greatness. There is
nothing about architecture in this passage, but for another the king him-
self jotted down a note: ‘Grands bailments, leur magnificence.’ 3 His
great building works at Versailles began in 1668. The court was fully and
finally installed there by 1682, after which the king seldom visited his
capital fifteen miles away. From 1693 to 1700 and from 1706 until he
died, he never once made the journey. The officials and courtiers who
surrounded him amounted to a settlement of about 10,000 people. In the
disastrous years of his last two wars the expenditure was perforce reduced,
but the government of France was carried on in this extraordinary loca-
tion and this extraordinary environment until the outbreak of revolution
in 1789.
The official theory represented the ostentation of the French monarchy
as an expression of wealth and power, and maintained that it rendered
personal government more acceptable ; but this justification did not con-
vince every observer. Bernard Mandeville, born in Holland and settled in
England, argued that the luxury of courts was not merely politic but was
promoted and enjoyed as an end in itself. ‘Where there is a real Power’,
he wrote, ‘it is ridiculous to think that any Temperance or Austerity of
1 Les soupirs de la France esclave (? Amsterdam, 1689), p. 23, formerly attributed to
Pierre Jurieu, but probably mainly by Michel Levasson. No doubt the sense of the word
‘etat’ is not exactly the same in these two passages, nor again in Louis’s words on his
death-bed: ‘Je m’en vais, mais l’fkat demeurera apres moi': CEuvres (Paris, 1806), 11, 491.
- Ibid. 1, 21. 3 Ibid. 1, 193, 225.
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Life should ever render the person in whom that Power is lodg’d con-
temptible in his Office, from an Emperor to the Beadle of a Parish.’ 1 He
mentioned the contrast between the greatness of the Dutch republic and
the personal simplicity of John de Witt, and this contrast had a literary
history which began in de Witt’s own lifetime. 2 The vast apparatus of the
French monarchy was an outcome of peculiarly French conditions, and it
was a sign of weakness as well as of strength.
Louis shone at Versailles at the head of the French nobility. In the civil
wars of the middle of the century the hereditary nobility, feudal in origin,
had been quelled. It no longer gathered in national constitutional
assemblies, and in those provinces where the Estates still met to assent to
taxes, the intendants no longer had to assert the royal power but merely
went through the moves of a game of management. At court, as indeed
throughout the whole nation, there prevailed a universal desire for titles,
offices and marks of distinction, and this enabled the king, by an elabor-
ately systematised etiquette, to take advantage equally of the ambitions of
the prosperous and the necessities of the impoverished. In the army,
commands and opportunities for promotion went largely by social rank;
but the ministers Le Tellier and Louvois established the authority of the
State over the army, and here the king gained another great and growing
field of patronage. The nobility was not an absolutely closed caste. The
highest ranks could be conferred, and there were ways of evading the
genealogical restrictions which nominally closed some of the avenues to
newcomers. Even if they did not rise in rank themselves, men who had
become rich in other walks of life could marry their daughters to their
superiors and so ennoble their descendants. On the other hand, nobility
remained in essence a status of privilege. Many noblemen exercised
seigniorial jurisdiction. The central government achieved nothing of
importance in restraining this, and there were instances, at least in com-
paratively inaccessible places, where it was grossly abused. Landowners,
both great and poor, encroached on common rights, and royal edicts,
issued from 1667 onwards, failed to check them. Above all the nobility
were exempt from taxation. In the later stages of the reign Vauban and
other critics of the government saw this privilege as the main obstacle to
reform of the revenue. The government itself so far recognised this as to
institute in the capitation of 1695 the first universal tax; but this innova-
tion of principle was on too small a scale to mitigate the evil.
The noblesse d'epee was thus in itself an obstacle to central control. It
was also the nucleus of a growing complex of obstacles. In the first place
the Church was connected with the nobility in a variety of ways. It also
1 The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford, 1924), n, 164-6. It appears, though there
is some room for doubt, that the whole of this passage was written as early as 1714.
8 Mandeville refers to Sir William Temple, in whose Observations on the United Pro-
vinces (London, 1673), it occurs on p. 1 13 ; but Temple had read the travels of Cosimo de’
Medici, who also has it: ed. G. J. Hoogewerfif (Utrecht, 1919), p. 247, written in 1669.
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was a field of royal patronage. Ecclesiastics were employed in great affairs,
especially in diplomacy. Shortly before the end of his life Louis deprived
the due de Nevers of his right to choose the bishops of the small see of
Clamecy, and so completed his control of the French sees. Not all of the
sees were rich, but with these and seven hundred abbeys, the king disposed
of most of the major ecclesiastical offices. He used this power to gratify
and control noble families and he paid little attention to the lower clergy,
who, stage for stage, belonged to the less privileged or the unprivileged
classes. The Church, however, was less dependent than the nobility.
Every fifth year it held its general assembly to vote its own don gratuit, and
it also made other grants and loans, which had to be negotiated for. The
Gallican Church, if a faithful, was still in theory an independent ally, and
it enjoyed its own privileges and exemptions. It did not provide a counter-
poise to the nobility. The persecution of the Huguenots at once restricted
and hardened the ecclesiastical element in social organisation.
The next group which maintained its own interests was the noblesse de
robe. Like the feudal nobility the members of the higher courts of justice
had failed to make good some of their pretensions in the civil wars, and
throughout Louis’s reign they were treated with disfavour: their seats
were in Paris and some of the provincial capitals ; Versailles was not for
them. In fact, however, they and the whole legal population were still
indispensable. There was no hard and fast line between the legal career
and the official career. All those who held substantial positions in either
belonged in a general way to the same social grouping, and there was
coming and going between the two wings. The intendants were chosen
from the corps of maitres des requites, whose functions were partly
judicial and whose number was fixed in 1689 at eighty-eight. Judicial
appointments were filled by higher officers appointed by the Crown; but
two things preserved both the lawyers and the officials from becoming
mere functionaries. First, they also had their privileges. In the higher
ranks, from which the small body of ministers almost all originated, these
were the full privileges of titular nobility; but at the level of the bourgeois
placeman there were many offices whose holders were exempt from
taxation. Their number constantly grew, for they were all involved in the
system of the sale of offices. This system was not confined to France. In
itself it was not unreasonable: when an incoming office-holder makes a
payment to his outgoing predecessor he provides something towards that
predecessor’s livelihood in retirement and he gives a guarantee that he will
pay some attention to his new duties. But such a system may obviously
generate inefficiency, extortion and corruption. Although they were aware
of this and frequently tried to act on their knowledge, the government of
Louis XIV could not afford financially to break away from the inherited
system. The State itself sold offices, sometimes hereditary offices, and took
its share when offices changed hands. Thus security of tenure, necessary
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to keep up the market-rates of these transactions, was coupled with the
multiplication of official or nominally official posts. Those who bought or
inherited them were naturally not all fit to hold them. The system was
extended in the time of Colbert to many functions connected with com-
merce and industry, and in later years to some connected with naval
administration. A decree of 1681 granted tax-exemption to a large
number of office-holders. In the eighteenth century it was reckoned
that there were 4000 offices which conferred nobility, and, for the earlier
part of Louis’s reign, the whole number of offices is estimated at 40,000
to 50,000.
During the reign of Louis XTV the expansion of government activities,
especially in war and warlike preparations, created new employment at
every level from that of the ruling few to the manual workers, and as the
numbers of men employed increased, their tasks inevitably became more
specialised. The new prosperity of industry and commerce, even if it was
artificially forced at the expense of activities outside its range, had similar
effects. This implies a growth of organising, clerical and trading work, of
the bourgeois element, and in the culture of the period the rise of the
bourgeois spirit was plainly visible. The system of privilege and of status
conferred from above, however, in combination with other tendencies,
cloaked and distorted the social development of the bourgeoisie. Muni-
cipal institutions, which showed some signs of revival after the civil wars,
were weakened in the interests of royal authority. In economic affairs the
great towns, with partial exceptions, as in the ‘republic’ of Marseilles, lost
such autonomy as they had. Constitutionally their autonomy was that of
narrow and selfish oligarchies, incapable of resisting the intendants when
they intervened on behalf of the unenfranchised. In 1692 the mayors
became officiers, and so were brought into the hierarchy of mutually
jealous dependants, each with his own vested interest. In this world, as
at Versailles, there was no rallying-point for ambition except the royal
favour, and the rising bourgeois like the courtier aimed at privilege and
marks of distinction. Not only lawyers but physicians and bankers
secured exemption from seigniorial corvees for themselves, but only for
themselves. The accountant’s profession was emerging ; but when we hear
of independent accountants who work not for employers but for clients,
it is in the character of jures teneurs de livres, officials. It does not appear
that the professional men advanced towards coherent organisations for
maintaining a balance between their skill, their social services and their
rewards, by controlling the relations between practitioners and clients.
It was much the same with business men. Chambers of commerce and
other assemblies under official auspices formed part of the machinery set
up by Colbert; but the merchants, instead of trying to reform the old
municipal life or build on these new foundations, returned perpetually to
schemes for soliciting ennoblement, or something like it, for themselves.
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Thus what might have been a rising middle class was divided and sub-
divided by its relation to privilege and centralised government.
The notion of society as divided into upper, middle and lower strata is
indeed of little use as applied to France at that time. There was a division
between privileged and unprivileged. Above it there were gradations of
wealth and estimation, but the many partitions prevented the formation
of classes united by similarity of functions and ways of life and conscious
of common interests. Below the line there were great differences of
material welfare from the upper peasants and artisans to the poorest
labourers. Within the great area of France there was as much variety in
agrarian and even in industrial relations as there was in soil and surface
and natural resources. The worst experiences of the poorest were terrible,
and not only in years of famine such as 1662, 1693 and 1709. In some
places and in some years there were alarming outbreaks of rioting and
even rebellion. These bulk larger in the works of modem historians than
they did in contemporary writings, partly because there was no reporting
of the executions and the movements of troops except in secret official
correspondence. They were, however, all regional ; there was never a move-
ment of discontent through the whole nation. In 1662-3 there was trouble
in the Bourbonnais, in 1664-6 in Gascony and Beam, in 1670 in the
Vivarais, in 1675 in Brittany, and so on. The repression never overtaxed
the resources of the authorities; nor did they ever make concessions to
discontent which implied anything but local and limited conciliation.
Government was stronger than it had been in the middle of the century,
and only stray phrases can be cited to show that it was beginning to con-
sider itself responsible for the welfare of the population as a whole.
Effective central control of a State implies the absence of intermediate
powers between the centre and the individual citizen. The State of
Louis XIV made little progress in establishing direct contact with the
citizen except in his capacity as tax-payer. When compulsory military
service was introduced on a small scale with the milice of 1688, the selec-
tion of men was left to each parish. No civil authority kept a register of
the people. The registration of baptisms, marriages and burials was done
by the clergy. An edict of 1667 provided, among other things, that a copy
of the register should be sent to the greffe or record-office of the bailliage,
but even if they had always been well posted, which they were not, these
registers would have been useless for any civil purpose. In the newly
annexed territories of Flanders and Alsace, as in Brittany and the
Pyrenees, the government did not seriously press the use of French at the
expense of the other languages that were spoken ; but this arose less from
any liberal policy than from the absence of any need for the government
to communicate directly with the common man. In exceptional cases there
might be direct dealings, for instance in the inscription maritime. All sea-
faring men were enrolled for purposes of naval recruitment; but this was
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possible only because it affected a limited body of men, concentrated in
the seaports and easy to identify.
Although the range and depth of its action were limited in all these ways,
the monarchy of Louis XIV impressed all Europe, and in one respect or
another it was taken as a model in many lands. Its armies were imitated
even after the tide of victory had turned. Its architecture, its gardens, its
court etiquette set the fashion. Some of its administrative successes were
equally easy to follow. Perhaps the improved street-lighting of London,
The Hague, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Berlin in 1670-90 was hastened
by the example of La Reynie, lieutenant general de police from 1667, who
provided Paris with 6500 reflecting candle-lanterns. In larger matters,
however, the possibility of French influence depended on the prevailing
social conditions. In the Spanish Netherlands, a small country, in many
ways resembling the adjoining regions of France, it was possible for such
a minister as Bergeyck to acclimatise the ideas and methods of Colbert.
In England there had been a movement for administrative efficiency in the
time of Strafford, and another had begun when the parliamentarians
organised their effort in the Civil War. The exiles who returned from
France at the Restoration brought no lessons with them in this field, but
France was near at hand, and in the following years the abler among the
supporters of prerogative power learnt from the French experience. In
1682-8 Sunderland and Godolphin stood not for native Toryism but for a
continental, that is a French, ideal. Their policy was rejected for many
political and constitutional reasons, but its failure was also due to social
obstacles remarkably unlike those which prescribed the limits to central-
ised authority in France. Decisive and lasting reforms were carried out
during the French war of William HI, but they owed little or nothing to
French inspiration.
Alexis de Tocqueville showed in a brilliant excursus that the French
administrative centralisation of the ancien regime could best be judged in
Canada. Here many of the visible and invisible obstacles to its free
development did not exist. There was scarcely any nobility; the Church
was not dominant; the judiciary had no roots in ancient institutions and
usages; the tradition of feudalism was lost or obscured. Therefore there
were no municipal or provincial institutions at all; administrative inter-
ference was ubiquitous and all initiative came from France. But in the
adjoining English colonies, where there was the same freedom from
European social ties, he saw exactly the opposite: vigorous local and
provincial government, individualism, and no central administration
worth the name. 1 The explanation of the contrast lay in the difference
between the two mother countries.
The three kingdoms ruled by the English kings were constitutionally
1 V artcien regime et la revolution franfaise (Paris, 1856), pp. 385-7.
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separate. Throughout the whole period of Louis XIV it seemed possible
that they might once more be divided by civil war. They actually did
undergo a revolution, and for three years Ireland was a theatre of war.
Even when there were no political disturbances, law and order were not
much better maintained in Scotland or even in England than they were in
France. French observers were taken by surprise when, in spite of all this,
the three kingdoms were able to maintain great fleets and considerable
armies without exhausting their finances or splitting their precarious
cohesion. That they were able to do so does indeed illustrate the fact that
the demands of war, even after the military revolution, did not penetrate
very deeply into the structure of society. Recruiting did not interfere with
the manning of industry, and even the compulsory recruiting of the navy,
though it annoyed the merchant marine, does not seem to have left it short
of necessary men. The supplying of the forces did not create serious
shortages for the civilian consumer. The losses and inconveniences of war
did not aggravate the existing discontents to the point of danger. So
much might have been said of any belligerent country which was not
invaded by an enemy ; but there were conditions in England which made
it exceptionally applicable there. England had reached a point at which
economic improvement and reorganisation, so far from being set back by
the wars, actually took advantage of them. Again it was true of all Europe
that the demands of the State still weighed lightly on society; but in
England the social structure was such that they pressed less heavily than
in France.
The two great problems of relations with Scotland and relations with
Ireland remained unsolved, but in the course of the period each of them
was so changed that, on the basis of innumerable links of influence and
interest, they became problems of management rather than of sovereignty:
Ireland was reconquered, and Scotland finally came into a constitutional
union (1707). They were both comparatively simple countries and changed
comparatively little in social organisation. In England in some important
respects there was less need than in France for any centralising reform.
There were no internal economic barriers. Except for some insignificant
anomalies the law was uniform and the administration of justice was
under a single control. There was nothing to hinder a radical reform of
finance; and, in spite of some quaint medieval survivals, this was in fact
accomplished. Outside the spheres of war, justice and taxation, however,
there was no corps of officials and the State had few men in its employ. It
had no closer contact with the individuals who composed the mass of the
population than in France. It did not interfere with the Celtic languages.
During the interlude of Puritan rule before 1660, perhaps mainly for
religious reasons, the registration of births, marriages and burials by
justices of the peace had been substituted for the old ecclesiastical registra-
tion of baptisms, marriages and burials. The old system came back with
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the Restoration, but in 1695-6 the procedure of registration was some-
what improved and from that time all births were to be notified to the
incumbent of the parish. Still no copies of the registers went to any civil
and few to any diocesan authority. There was no approach to an etat civil,
and even attempts to imitate the French inscription maritime were unsuc-
cessful. The government, lacking any officials to carry it out, could make
little or no use (outside the sphere of commercial statistics) of the tech-
nique of survey. When, on one occasion, the Board of Trade wished to
know how much money was levied in poor-rates throughout the kingdom,
the only means of collecting this information was by very defective
returns from the parish clergy.
In this instance the desire for knowledge and for a vigorous policy
founded on it was frustrated partly because there were no organs through
which it could act, and partly by the inertia of a conservative society.
There were other instances in which this inertia showed itself capable of
withstanding determined efforts of the royal authority. Two kings,
Charles II and James II, used processes of law to attack the politically
troublesome liberties of the boroughs. The ultimate result was the opposite
of what happened in France, and the survival of the English municipal
oligarchies illustrates some of the main peculiarities of the English society.
The boroughs were saved by the revolution and the revolution was made,
or at least led, by the nobility.
Like those of France the noblemen of England had lost something of
their standing in the civil wars. The majority of them had been royalists
and they had profited from the Restoration, but they were no longer
feudal chieftains. In 1629 a Dutch spectator of the Garter procession at
Whitehall, when each knight led his train of gentlemen, was reminded of
the Polish nobility at their diet which he had seen two years before. 1 The
English magnates no longer made this impression. The court was modest
in its display. Rank brought privileges with it, but never either juris-
diction or exemption from taxes. The holders of hereditary titles were few
in number; the younger sons of peers had distinguishing names, but
nothing of the sort lasted into the third generation except for the senior
line. The immediate family connections of the peerage thus ramified
widely into a governing class which was even more accessible to new-
comers than the French nobility and not formally separated from the
upper regions of commercial and industrial wealth. There was a landed
aristocracy, but it was allied on the one hand with the lesser landowners
and on the other with influential men in business and the professions. It
was powerful, but it exercised its power through public institutions and as
the leading element of the governing class. Its members had a first claim
on some of the highest offices and an advantage in competing for any of
1 A. Boot, ‘Joumaal’ in Bijdragen en mededeelingen van het Hist. Genootschap, lvii
(Utrecht, 1936), 84.
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them; this competition was systematised by the formation of groups and
parties; but open, if unreported, discussion in constitutional assemblies
assured a general control by the governing class over the appointment and
conduct of ministers. There were hereditary offices of great dignity, but
they no longer carried power with them, and in minor offices heredity was
unimportant. Both in the army and in the State, offices were bought and
sold; but this system was restricted as the finances of the State improved;
in the army it was brought under a degree of supervision and it never gave
the civilian placeman anything like a freehold. The resistance to central-
ising and innovating tendencies thus had a different basis from that in
France. It was the collective conservatism of the complex social class
which controlled the two houses of parliament. Through them this class
dealt by legislation, often on local and particular matters, with the agenda
which in France fell to the share of the intendants and their subordinates.
The position of the Church was weaker than in France. The Crown
indeed chose the twenty-six bishops and exercised some minor patronage;
the bishops, as members of the House of Lords, were an essential element
in the conduct of business, and the clergy, who unlike the French clergy
could marry, were becoming more closely associated both in the higher
and lower ranks with the governing class. But the habit of appointing
churchmen to high secular offices died out. In fact, and from 1689 in law,
the established Church did not include the whole nation. It also surren-
dered its right to vote its own taxes, and after that it made no serious use
of its assemblies even for purely ecclesiastical purposes. Its corporate
feeling was undermined by dissensions, and its influence was exerted
rather in the parishes than on the national stage.
Local government in the towns was left to its own devices sufficiently to
afford room on the one hand for public-spirited initiative and on the other
for disgraceful corruption. It was at its best in some of the larger towns
where substantial men took part in it. The elective officers who admini-
stered the poor-law could do much, within the limits of prevailing ideas,
to mitigate the hardships of poverty. National legislation failed to
rationalise the system. A reformed poor-law might have been less indulgent
to human weaknesses, and, in spite of many abuses, the existing law did
mean that the local authorities acknowledged a responsibility at least to
the ‘ deserving ’ poor.
Outside the towns the poor-law officers, like the constables and other
parish officers, were subordinate in various ways to the justices of the
peace. These were appointed by the Crown and primarily in order to
administer justice in small matters over their humble neighbours ; collec-
tively, assembled in quarter-sessions, they not only supervised the police
and administration of the parishes, but also acted as administrative
authorities. In theory the county, like the parish, was ‘a unit of obliga-
tion’: its people owed duties to the Crown and its officers saw to their
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discharge. In practice it was an autonomous administrative area, and
many counties were so extensive that they were rather regions than local
divisions. The justices of the peace at this time were for the most part
landed gentry; the magnates did not act directly in these affairs in their
own localities. They left this routine work to lesser men over whom, of
course, they had influence if they chose to exert it. The counties were thus
governed by amateurs, who have been described, perhaps with too much
disparagement, as ‘ an extra-legal oligarchy ’. The Crown communicated
with them through the circuit judges and occasionally through a secretary
of state. They had personal connections with members of parliament, as
well as votes in their election, so that parliamentary local legislation took
account of at least some local interests and opinions. No one appears to
have lamented the absence of a professional administrative hierarchy.
The demand for professional and business work, and the consequent
specialisation of functions, came about in England as in France, but with
different results. It made no noticeable difference to the organisation of
the bar and the bench, which had their own traditions and strongly
rooted corporations. In the other branch of the legal profession there
were some changes. They had never had any corporate organisation : the
attorneys were subdivided and more clearly separated from the solicitors,
whose status was lower than theirs. Both branches of the medical pro-
fession rose in prestige : there were great improvements in the treatment of
disease, and the rewards of successful practice became greater. No new
professional bodies were created, but of those which existed none failed
to manifest some degree of activity. Veterinary science was beginning to
be studied in France, but apparently not in England. Architects were
more clearly distinguished from builders, but they formed no association.
There were accountants, most of them teachers as well as practitioners of
accountancy. Curiously enough their profession seems to have been more
fully developed in Scotland than in England.
There was nowhere any attempt to shelter the rising professions under
the aegis of government. If anything they moved away from government
rather than towards it. They also became more distinct from other ele-
ments of society in another way. Their work had attractions of its own,
and in it advantages of education and upbringing could contribute to
advancement. Their more successful members came into contact with the
great and prosperous. Thus it came to be thought that certain professions
were more suitable for gentlemen than trade or industry. The younger sons
of landowners were now much less commonly apprenticed in London or
the provincial towns. In the reign of Charles II the appropriate authorities
declared that it was compatible with armorial bearings to engage in
wholesale commerce, and there were magnates in business to whom all
doors were open; but the Church, the bar and the army, to be followed in
no long time by medicine, established a place in the public esteem which
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made them into strong buttresses of the social order. Of these three, the
army was virtually a new career, and the habit of taking commissions in it
gradually brought about a considerable change in the horizons of the
landed gentry. England approximated more closely than France to the
condition of a country with a developed middle class, but perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that in England the middle classes, though
attached by many affinities to the governing class, and nowhere rigidly
separated from it, had some weight of their own.
Whatever its merit and shortcomings may have been there was nothing
in the distinctively British social order which could tempt foreigners to
imitation. The same is true of the social structure, and of the constitu-
tional and administrative, as distinguished from the economic, arrange-
ments of the other liberal State of the West, the United Provinces of the
Netherlands. Here indeed, after the revolutionary period of the war of
independence, there had been a successful and even a conscious effort to
equal the accepted European standards of good government. By the
middle of the century the federal constitution was mature and firmly
established. It was destined, in spite of a succession of alarming crises,
to last through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but foreign
observers did not expect this and pardonably failed to understand that
it had a firm basis well-fitted to endure. There was unrestrained variety
between the constitutions of the seven sovereign provinces, and parts of
the territory of the republic were even external to these provinces.
William III, sovereign in his own principality of Orange, was a high
officer of the generality, and also of five of the seven provinces, with
different rights and functions in each of his numerous capacities, always
jealously watched when he tried to enlarge them. In each province there
were special local compromises to effect a balance between town and
country, between noble and other landowners, between elective and
hereditary authorities, between governing assemblies and executive
officers, between public authority and private influence. In the dominant
province, Holland, the larger towns, and especially the great city of
Amsterdam, could generally prevail over opposition ; but this was not the
case in any of the other provinces, and a general will of the whole republic
could only be arrived at by an indescribably complicated process of
management and negotiation. The union as a whole had no bureaucracy,
and except for finance it had practically no civil administration. The
army, consisting largely of foreign mercenaries, was federal and the naval
command was unified under the admiral -general ; but the dockyards, the
supplies and the manning of the fleet were under five separate colleges in
three of the maritime provinces.
In spite of all this, the republic exerted greater power in proportion to
its population than either Great Britain or France, and in some depart-
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ments of domestic government, such as prison-administration and poor-
relief, it was widely admired. This paradox is not to be explained merely
by the great wealth and the unique business experience of the maritime
provinces. The Dutch also had special aptitudes for public life. Their
governing class was anomalous and ill-defined, but it was well stocked
with men fit for responsible offices, and it habitually gave them neither
too little scope nor too much. It was more predominantly civilian than
those of France or England. It had a professional wing in the legally
educated pensionaries and ‘ griffiers ’ of the towns, the provinces and the
States General . 1 It included some country landowners and many mem-
bers of the urban patriciates. These were not active merchants as their
grandfathers had been, but they were men of property and, along with
every other kind of wealth, they owned real estate in town and country.
They were well educated and well informed, and they kept a monopoly
of many offices by a system of co-optation as exclusive as heredity was
in other countries. Otherwise they were not socially isolated from the
more prosperous among the bourgeoisie of merchants and professional
men. The ecclesiastics belonged to this bourgeoisie. There was an estab-
lished Church, but it had no national, only a provincial, organisation, and
there was a large tolerated minority outside it. In its presbyterian organ-
isation there were no prelates, nor were ecclesiastics employed in offices
of State.
When institutions work satisfactorily in spite of being on paper
apparently unworkable, the explanation is not likely to lie only on the side
of those who exercise power and influence. There will probably be some
relevant social and legal freedom, and some positive qualities of mind and
character widely diffused through the general population. Partly because
the absence of central organs made it practically impossible to impose
uniformity, but also because they were valued for their own sakes, free-
dom of thought and of expression met with less interference among the
Dutch than in any other part of Europe. So far as it is possible to make a
comparison in a field where general impressions cannot be closely tested,
the Dutch were a well-educated nation. Literacy seems to have been at a
relatively high level, and knowledge of many kinds seems to have been
widely spread. A considerable number of people of all kinds, in the
country as well as in the towns, seem to have profited from a long-
standing education in affairs. There were common enterprises which in
their nature could only be handled by pooling the local knowledge and
the good sense of all concerned, that is by allowing free discussion to run
across some of the barriers of wealth and influence. The best example is
1 The word pensionaris means ‘stipendiary’, a paid official; the office of raad pensionaris
held by John de Witt under the Estates of Holland meant ‘stipendiary councillor’. The
English translations ‘council pensionary’ and ‘grand pensionary’ miss the meaning
altogether. Griffier, the office held by the principal servant of the States General, like the
French greffier means nearly the same as ‘secretary’.
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that of the authorities for diking and draining, where engineering require-
ments, financial considerations and conflicting local interests all had to be
reconciled by authorities, partly elective, on whose decisions the livelihood
and even the lives of the population depended. In experience like this
innumerable little social cells, each looking after its own immediate
affairs, engendered a public spirit and this burgher-organism provided a
firmer base for the superstructure of the State than the societies where the
ruling classes showed greater distinction and ideas took a wider range of
flight. 1
For the time being, then, the two liberal States, unlike France, were not
imitated abroad. Even the influence of France and the other tendencies
towards uniformity of manners and practices, though they went deeper
than the surface, did little to promote any new European unity. Not only
did the wars exacerbate international differences. In each of the three
countries that we have examined they led the State to strengthen its own
organs and to make increased demands on its subjects. As it did so under
the stress of emergencies, it had to conform to its inherited social tradi-
tions, and so, although in many ways the whole Continent responded
uniformly to the military revolution, the outcome confirmed each
country in its idiosyncrasies and deepened the clefts between them. It
contributed to the deepening of another and geographically larger social
division, that between the eastern and western regions which were
separated, roughly speaking, by the line of the Elbe and then by the
border of Germany down to the Alps. Primarily this was a division
between contrasting types of agrarian relations, but these necessarily
involved corresponding contrasts in other economic and social matters.
In the west the tillers of the soil were relatively free; in the east they were
less free and their subjection was becoming more severe and more
systematic.
In France, although royal intervention in favour of the peasants was
ineffective, and although some large proprietors were consolidating and
increasing their possessions, most of the peasants were personally free in
the eyes of the law. The same was true of Sweden and western Germany,
and also of the British Isles, where there were many large properties and
landless labourers. In Spain, where such relations were even more wide-
spread, except in Catalonia there was little active unrest among the
peasantry. In Italy feudal jurisdictions and other survivals were mitigated
by free economic relations between landlords and tenants. In Portugal in
1702 serfdom was abolished on the royal domains. In the east an
opposite tendency prevailed and especially in the great plains where the
1 This sentence is paraphrased from S. J. Fockema Andreae in the co-operative Algemene
Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (Utrecht, 1953), vi, 62. This admirable chapter seems to give
the first explicit account of the underlying social realities of Dutch republican institutions.
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production of corn for export by sea was carried on for profit by com-
paratively large estates. Even in Denmark, as in eastern Germany, and
southwards to Bohemia and Switzerland, the landowners depressed their
tenants, not by a serfdom which bound them to the soil, but by oppressive
jurisdiction and services. In the more northerly parts there was no com-
bined resistance. In Denmark the small freeholders had disappeared long
before. In 1660, when King Frederick III made the royal power absolute, 1
no attention was paid to the grievances expressed by the peasantry; an
edict of emancipation for Sealand and Laaland issued by Frederick IV in
1702 was a dead letter, and during the eighteenth century the condition of
the peasants continued to deteriorate. Farther south, however, there were
disturbances. In Switzerland, where the masters of the peasantry were the
rising town patriciates, there had been a decisive conflict in 1646-53, and
there was no further disorder; something was done to alleviate discontent
by concessions. In Bohemia, after a succession of local outbreaks, a serious
peasant rising broke out in 1680. The Emperor put down the insurrection
by force, but he also granted the Pardubitz Pragmatic or Robotpatent,
which was intended to restrain the oppressions of the great landowners.
Not, however, until a generation later did imperial edicts bring any
substantial reform. In Hungary the national rebellions of 1677-1710
deflected a social movement against the landowners from its course.
Germany, half in the one region and half in the other, had already its
own well-established administrative experience, and modern centralised
government was first practised by some of the German States. In the
sixteenth century, as Landesherrschaft developed into Landeshoheit,
officials of a new type took charge of finance, justice and military admini-
stration. Austria, Bavaria, Saxony and Brandenburg made use of them
and adopted the system of a single general council with subordinate,
specialised commissions. The officials were for the most part educated in
the legal faculties of the universities. It was not until the eighteenth century
that the German universities fully recognised aspects of social study which
were not related to law, and so came to train their students for
official life in what came to be called Kameralwissenschaft ; but the
ground was already being prepared for that development. The scope of
legal education was interpreted widely. In 1694 the University of Halle
was founded, and in 1687 Thomasius lectured in German at Leipzig. The
best political and economic thought in Germany emanated from the
legally trained officials. Some of them broke away from the irresponsible,
if stimulating, projector-mentality of which Johann Joachim Becher
(1635-82) was the most prominent exponent, and wrote as practical ad-
ministrators planning improvements and especially increases of revenue.
They were not scientists, but they were at home with maps, with the
method of survey, and with simple calculations. Since the German States
1 See below, ch. xxu, p. 524.
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were comparatively small, officials passed from one to another in the
course of their careers, carrying the lessons of their experience with them,
and several of the writers avowedly offered their advice to German States
in general, aiming at an improvement in the standards of government
throughout the Empire. A good example is Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff
(1626-92), whose works were well known outside Germany. He was in
the electoral service of Brandenburg, but his books were published outside
the Elector’s dominions and were meant for general use.
When the rulers of Brandenburg established their own system of personal
and centralised government they had thus serviceable instruments ready
to hand, and the military revolution favoured the attempt, as it did also in
other German States. In Austria, Bavaria, Wtirttemberg, and probably
in other States, the military career began to attract members of the noble
families. Brandenburg’s most dangerous neighbour was Sweden, a poor
country (like Brandenburg itself and Prussia) which had developed
military strength by ruthlessly exploiting its resources of men and money.
The Swedish example counted for something, and even in the eighteenth
century it was on the Swedish pattern that conscription, based on ade-
quate registers, was introduced in the kingdom of Prussia. The Great
Elector, Frederick William (1640 to 1688) was not completely identified in
origin and interests with any one part of his complex of territories. In
Brandenburg itself he was the Calvinist ruler of a Lutheran population.
With Prussia his connection was purely dynastic. The prosperous western
bishoprics and duchies which he acquired at the Peace of Westphalia
differed in social structure and economic interests from his inherited
States. But the wide dispersal of these units, and the absence of defensible
natural frontiers, made a strong army and tight organisation necessary.
In the army the French example was paramount; French architecture and
manners left their traces; but the system as a whole was fundamentally
unlike that of France, and was imposed with such correct estimation of
social forces that, after initial conflicts which were neither very severe nor
long protracted, it remained unchallenged until the French revolutionary
wars. From the army reorganisation spread to finance : the central war-
fund was established in 1674. The Intendantur der Armee, which owed
little beyond its name to the French, became the nucleus of a new central
government for all the dominions: the ministries of war, finance and the
interior, in fact the whole organism of State control, branched out from
this stem. In the western provinces such as Cleves and Mark social
relationships resembled those in the neighbouring Dutch and German
territories: in a comparatively wealthy economy, with a comparatively
dense population, the interests of town and country were no longer
opposed to one another, and the nobility had lost much of its dominance
over a free peasantry. Here, therefore, although the local institutions were
weakened and although by 1672 the Elector had them at his mercy, he did
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not suppress them. At the price of considerable concessions in taxation, he
allowed the Estates to survive. In his eastern dominions, however, where
the nobility formed the strongest element, he cleared the way for the new
system of finance by depriving the provincial Estates of their control. He
was able to make these drastic changes because he established a two-sided
alliance with the nobles. The towns were too weak to form a counterpoise
to the nobility, and so he restricted their rights. He granted privileges to
the nobles, including seigniorial rights and exemption from taxes. But
there was never any danger that the nobility as a body would obstruct
absolutism as it did in France; for the other side of the Elector’s alliance
with them was that he drew them into the well-rewarded but exacting
service of the State. The families of the greater landowners began to
provide officers for the army and officials for the bureaucracy. ‘The
leading positions in the Commissariats were held almost exclusively by
noblemen. Of 34 Kriegsrate and Geheime Kriegsrdte appointed by
Frederick William, 29 were noblemen, most of them native Junkers.’ 1
This powerful working nobility was not more unlike the French nobility
than the monarchy it served was unlike the French monarchy. The
Electors had a court and palaces, in which the influence of France could
be seen; the successor of Frederick William ascended to kingly rank; but
the absolute rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia were working monarchs.
From what has been said about France, Great Britain, the United
Provinces and Brandenburg-Prussia some general conclusions may be
drawn which seem to hold good when the neighbouring countries are also
taken into account. The social structure of Europe was changing under
the pressure of several major forces, none of which either originated or
acted independently of the others. Knowledge, both scientific and useful,
had grown; the States had strengthened their control over their subjects;
they used the power so acquired in wars against one another ; the resources
of wealth and manpower on which they could draw had increased. For
all these reasons and many others social divisions followed new lines of
differentiation, especially in making room for larger and more diversi-
fied middle classes. But in each community these tendencies encountered
special conditions which clothed them in unique local wrappings: in
France privilege and status; in Great Britain the inertia of a governing
class; in the Netherlands the paucity of central organs; in Brandenburg-
Prussia the lack of a common groundwork below the centralising mon-
archy. These contrasts, and also the contrast between the east and the
west, so far from being smoothed away, became more abrupt. While a new,
cosmopolitan culture was beginning to polish manners and the arts and
literature to an even surface, at the economic and social level, and in the
organisation of wealth and force, differences grew greater rather than less.
1 F. L. Carsten, The Origins of Prussia (Oxford, 1954), p. 264.
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IN THEIR EUROPEAN SETTING
T he age of Louis XTV was not a time of great novelty in international
relations and international law. It cannot be compared, from this
point of view, with the Renaissance. Permanent embassies, for
example, were first established during the sixteenth century, and it was
then that the idea of an equilibrium in certain parts of Europe — later
called the ‘ balance of power ’ — originated in Italy, and more particularly
in Venice. For a long time sovereigns had been content to exchange
ambassadors only on important occasions when, for instance, they wished
to conclude a series of negotiations or to sign a treaty, the sovereign
reserving to himself the right to ratify or to repudiate the decisions taken.
But gradually, as ambassadors increased in number, it became common
practice to send them for unlimited periods to permanent posts in the most
important foreign capitals. On the death or the resignation of one of these
ambassadors a successor would be immediately appointed, and in this
way diplomacy became a career in which the greatest nobles sought to
distinguish themselves. As ambassadors were usually loaded with honours
there was no lack of candidates. The principal capitals were naturally the
most sought after. Such posts called for no exceptional ability, but rather
for listening, usually in silence, and only from time to time for speaking
up, with a word of truth or falsehood as might be dictated by the circum-
stances. Yet many ambassadors became useful observers, and their
despatches to their governments constitute for the historian of today one
of the most important sources for the history of international relations.
It was the Italians, especially the Venetians, who from the end of the
fifteenth century began to appoint permanent ambassadors. A little later
the papacy followed their example: the list of its ambassadors — they were
sent only to Catholic countries and were called by the Latin name of
‘ nuncio ’ — does not appear to be continuous until the second half of the
sixteenth century. The last to conform to the common practice were the
tsars of Russia, beginning with Peter the Great at the end of the seventeenth
century.
Louis XIV kept permanent ambassadors in the capitals of all the great
European States, except in Russia. In the less important States, such as
the German and Italian principalities, he placed agents of subordinate
rank, mere ‘residents’. Wherever he judged an ambassador to be unneces-
sary he appointed a resident minister with more limited privileges under
the title of ‘ Envoy Extraordinary ’ ; this was the case in Vienna because he
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would not concede the right of precedence which the Austrians accorded
to the Spanish ambassador. In Switzerland, a French ambassador resided
permanently at Soleure ; in the course of the reign he was to be seconded
by a ‘resident’ at Geneva and another in the Grisons. The title of ‘pleni-
potentiary’ had no very precise meaning, but usually designated anyone
who was charged with an important temporary mission, such as the
signing of a treaty.
These various representatives of the king were for the most part chosen
from the upper stratum of the noblesse d'epee. Not that the peers of the
realm were necessarily more competent than others, but the king believed
them to be capable of making a greater impression abroad; and besides,
in the event of their official salaries and allowances being too small to
sustain an appropriate standard of living, the noblemen, usually endowed
with substantial personal fortunes, were able to draw on their own funds.
Few members of the clergy were appointed, although their education
equipped them with a good knowledge of Latin, the most useful inter-
national language. At the beginning of the reign, there were among the
diplomats only a few members of the noblesse de robe, but their numbers
grew as the years passed until they began to represent the king even in the
more important capitals. Relations with the papacy presented special
problems. In the first instance, the post in Rome was little sought after by
prospective ambassadors because life in the pontifical capital was so
expensive that they could easily ruin themselves; furthermore, because
Paris and Rome distrusted each other, the king insisted on choosing the
papal representative, the nuncio, from a list of several candidates, a
formality which was imposed on no other sovereign but the head of the
Church. As high officials, fulfilling mainly a representative function,
ambassadors rarely took part in the life of the country in which they lived,
although in Paris some of them frequented the salons either to converse
or, more often, to play cards.
Louis XIV was particularly jealous of his powers as the director of
foreign policy and kept his diplomatic officials in strict subordination.
Even the minister who assisted him in this field, the Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs, was hardly more than an executive officer. He himself
prepared, and sometimes even worded, all diplomatic correspondence;
but as time passed and his difficulties increased he was to allow his
collaborator greater liberty. Money played an essential part in diplomacy,
especially in the diplomacy of Louis XIV. At the beginning of his reign
the king spent freely in order to win friends and allies abroad. Charles II
and James II were notoriously dependent on him for subsidies, and many
members of parliament, as well as Dutch and English ministers, were not
above bribery. ‘France’, a well-known Dutchman wrote in 1671, ‘gives
everywhere and everywhere buys what she cannot conquer.’ If they were
effective in Holland and England, gifts of French gold accomplished
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marvels in Germany, the country where consciences were most easily
bought. The Great Elector of Brandenburg, one of the most needy of
German princes, could never refuse anything asked of him providing it
was paid for, but he and many other princes did not feel bound for long
by obligations arising out of the subsidies which they received. ‘It cannot
be doubted’, wrote an experienced ambassador on his return from a
mission, ‘that nearly all our success in the negotiations in Switzerland
we owe to our money.’ Bankers thus found themselves indispensable
diplomatic auxiliaries. Yet this lasted only for a short period: after 1700
military expenditure absorbed all the available resources, and ‘the shower
of gold ceased ’.
The idea of an international balance was first spoken of in sixteenth-
century Italy, cut up into many principalities and thus a cause of dispute
among the great powers. Then, during the first half of the seventeenth
century, it was invoked in certain quarters to protect the German princi-
palities threatened by French policy. In the sixteenth century international
law was still in its infancy. During the seventeenth it began to inspire
studies of a basic nature, but its principles were still far from constituting
a proper code. It was scarcely more than a number of customs recognised
and observed by all European or ‘civilised ’ nations. If these customs were
not observed, sanctions were possible, but it would be difficult to say
exactly where they had ever been applied. In the sphere of international
legal theory, the most outstanding early works were those of Grotius
(Hugo de Groot, 1583-1630), a jurist from Delft. He acquired a great
reputation, but in his own lifetime did not enjoy all the esteem he deserved.
During the reign of Louis XIV there was scarcely any progress beyond
the state of affairs that had been reached before Grotius. The Congress of
Munster and the treaties of Westphalia which sprang from it, although
they did not mark any notable advance, were incomparably more impor-
tant than any earlier ones. ‘They gave’, said Ernest Nys, the noted
historian of international law, ‘a formal consecration to the international
society which was slowly being established on European soil.’ Yet after
1648, as before, the notion of a balance remained in the hands of the
publicists. Before it was used to define the general relations between
States it was applied in a great variety of ways: people spoke of the
balance of trade and navigation, or the balance of religion; and every kind
of hegemony in whatever sphere it might show itself was thus condemned.
Later in the century statesmen outside France used the idea of a balance
to muster arguments against the policy of Louis XTV, which was visibly
tending towards mastery of the Continent. With the accumulation of
errors and setbacks towards the end of Louis’s reign, many French people
in their turn began to use similar arguments, and this maxim was to
dominate the eighteenth century.
It is hardly possible to speak of international law in this period. The
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term ‘international practices’ seems more appropriate, for there existed
as yet no body of law with any authority over the forms of international
life. These practices were by no means very ancient and one would search
in vain for them in the Middle Ages. International law was a creation of
modem times, and one which evolved very slowly. Formerly, in seeking
to envisage the future, it had been usual to consider the fate of Christen-
dom as a whole. Now there was a growing tendency to think in terms of
a more limited unit, of Europe, or rather of what began to be termed
le corps europeen. The hesitant beginnings of international law during this
period must therefore cause no surprise. The usages of war were natur-
ally those which first attracted the attention of the theorists; Grotius
became famous by his Dc Jure Belli ac Pads, in which war figured more
largely than peace.
The most interesting aspects, for us as well as for the people of the time,
were provided by naval warfare and practices. The chief maritime powers,
the United Provinces, England and France, were the most vitally con-
cerned, but others, such as Venice and Portugal, were equally interested
in the solution of the problems that arose. In the struggle against the
ever-present evil of piracy, regulations had been drawn up during the
Middle Ages. A collection of precepts drawn from common law, the
coutumes d'Oleron, was made as early as the twelfth century, probably in
the French islands near the coast of Poitou. Grotius, for his part, wrote
his Mare Liberum against the Portuguese pretensions to the exclusive
dominion over the Indian Ocean; and this was the origin of a bitter con-
troversy with Portugal. Elsewhere, Venetian pretensions to the sovereignty
of the Adriatic, manifested since the sixteenth century, aroused many
protests and gave rise to a kind of international polemic. It was only later,
in the course of the eighteenth century, that the notion of the freedom of
the seas was to be generally accepted. Nys suggests that these pretensions
can be explained ‘ by the necessities of defence and of watching the coasts,
by motives arising from fiscal measures, or by the material needs of the
populations’. From 1664 Louis XIV turned his attention to the Barbary
pirates inflicting continuous losses on the commerce of Marseilles. He
dispatched a squadron to bombard Djidjelli in Algeria and in the ensuing
years made attacks on Algiers, which eventually signed a treaty in 1666,
one of those ill-respected conventions which depend upon a constant
readiness to use force. Tunis soon followed the example of Algiers,
without showing any greater constancy in keeping its engagements.
Throughout this period the question of the naval salute preoccupied the
maritime powers, especially France, Holland and England. It was cus-
tomary for two ships of different nationalities to salute when they met at
sea, and this could be done by firing a salvo or by dipping the colours.
Such acts of courtesy caused no difficulty before the seventeenth century,
that is, before the accession of James I of England who proved more
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sensitive in this matter than Elizabeth I. A serious incident that took
place in 1603 between France and England was settled through diplomatic
channels. The problem, however, became more difficult in the age of
Louis XIV, the great king showing himself especially haughty whenever
his own and his country’s prestige was at stake. An incident early in the
reign prompted Colbert, the Secretary of State for the Navy, to observe
that the king was ‘extremely jealous about salutes and points of honour’.
His subordinates, whether admirals or mere naval commanders, were
compelled to insist that every mariner pay all due respect to the French
colours. Before the personal rule of Louis XIV this question had mainly
divided the English and the Dutch. The Treaty of Westminster of 1654
solemnly recognised for the first time the right of salute, naturally in
favour of the victorious English. And these arrangements, ambiguous
though they were, were confirmed in 1667, at the conclusion of the second
Anglo-Dutch War, by the Treaty of Breda. The quarrel with France was
prolonged for several decades. Richelieu had failed in 1635 to secure an
agreement based on an exact reciprocity of rights ; it was therefore neces-
sary to begin afresh. In the early years of Louis’s rule, a diplomat was
disowned because he drew up an agreement giving precedence to the
English in the North Sea and to the French in the Atlantic. Negotiations
were begun once again; but, pride being equally strong on both sides, it
was impossible to reach an agreement. As a result the French and English
avoided meeting at sea even when they were allies.
Things were no better in relations with Spain. In 1679 and 1680 the
French admirals received formal orders to pursue Spanish galleys and to
challenge them if they did not salute first. In 1685 Tourville and Chateau-
Renault met a Spanish fleet near Alicante and demanded that its com-
mander should salute the French colours. On his refusal they attacked,
although France was at peace with Spain, and only retired, after killing
many Spaniards, when the admiral submitted. Such incidents were fre-
quent, all the more so because a royal order of 1671 forbade all Spanish
men-of-war to salute first. The dispute with the Dutch continued even
after peace had been restored between the two nations at Nymegen (1678).
In 1687 Tourville, on encountering the Dutch vice-admiral, descended on
him and forced him to salute. The following year a Dutch fleet and that of
Tourville engaged in a veritable battle off the Spanish coast over the same
issue, causing numerous casualties on both sides.
Colbert adopted the same arrogant point of view as his sovereign ; he
wrote in 1677: ‘France claims that all other nations must bow to her at
sea as at the court of Kings.’ The same year a collection of ‘Edicts,
Declarations and Regulations concerning naval affairs’ was published
which began with a completely intransigent regulation on the question of
the salute. Then, the following year, a stem lesson was inflicted on the
Genoese who were in constant rivalry on the seas with Marseilles and
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refused to recognise the French pretensions. A French squadron sent to
demand the first salute having met with a refusal, it launched a bombard-
ment of more than a thousand cannon-balls. Six years later, in 1684, a
great naval expedition fired a still more terrible cannonade which forced
the doge himself to visit Versailles to tender his apologies.
Towards the Turks, whom it was intended to treat as friends, greater
moderation was shown from the first. The ambassador who set sail for
Constantinople in 1668 was instructed to have his squadron show no
visible mark of nationality, in order to avoid difficulties over the salute in
case of encountering any vessels of the sultan. The treatment of the
Barbary States was different, although they officially recognised the
suzerainty of Constantinople: an article of the treaty concluded with
Algiers in 168 1 stipulated that, whenever a vessel of the emperor of France
(a title which the king liked to adopt in these countries) should drop
anchor before Algiers, it should be saluted with more guns than a ship
from any other country. After the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) the naval
protocol tended to become more flexible. It was understood by then that
nothing should be demanded of English vessels nor those of any kingdom :
in the preceding year the ambassador in London had had to deal with the
last Anglo-French incident. Henceforth the policy of intimidation was to
be directed only against ships flying republican colours.
The notion of coastal or ‘adjacent’ waters provoked serious contro-
versies in early maritime law. Coastal waters were conceived of in
contrast to the ‘ high seas ’ or ‘ open sea ’ ; but where did the coastal waters
end, and how were their limits to be established? In order to define their
extent there was much talk in the seventeenth century of the range of
cannon-fire, and this definition was finally adopted, though not until the
following century. In the meantime, the ‘high seas’ being thought of as
the ‘free seas’, and the two expressions being often used interchangeably,
there was a common tendency to oppose the monopolies which certain
countries tried to establish over adjacent seas. The English jurisconsult
and publicist John Selden published his Mare Clausum in opposition
to Grotius’s Mare Liberum ; and Louis XIV felt obliged to define in his
great naval ordinance of 1681 what was to be understood by mer littorale.
‘All that will be counted coastal waters’, it declared, ‘which the sea covers
and leaves bare during the new and full moons and up to where the great
tides reach on the beaches.’ However, as tides hardly existed in the
Mediterranean, the question could not be resolved in this way and, for
‘ the great tides ’, the words ‘ the greatest waves of winter ’ were substituted.
A number of other international problems which arose in wartime were
gradually coming to be resolved by common practices. Whether fighting
took place on land or at sea, there were usually prisoners to be exchanged.
This was done by exchanging numbers of equal ranks or one officer for
several soldiers . If by chance one side could not redeem all its own prisoners
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held by the other side, those not claimed could be sent to the galleys like
criminals in common law. Among the customs of war on land must be
mentioned the right of all belligerents to force the population in a theatre
of war to pay contributions in money or in kind. An excellent example of
an important ‘treaty of contribution’ ( trait 6 de contributions ) occurred
during the Franco-Dutch War when French and Spanish commissioners,
the latter representing the Netherlands, discussed the subject at length,
during the years preceding the peace of Nymegen, at the little Flemish
town of Deynze on the Lys. Finally, another strange custom, called the
droit de cloches , was the right of the commander of a fleet to carry off the
bells of a conquered town. Like most others, this right was flexible and
open to interpretation. In 1711, when Duguay-Trouin took Rio de
Janeiro he claimed this right and then declared that he would be content
if the city paid him a ransom for the bells.
Of the many international institutions which arose out of maritime
practices one of the most important was the consulate. It appears to have
originated in a collection of maritime customs, the ‘Consulate of the Sea’,
believed to have been written in the thirteenth century at Barcelona, which
rendered the same services in the Mediterranean that the coutumes
d'Oleron performed on the ocean. But the origin of the institution
remains rather obscure. Originally qualified representatives of the foreign
merchants who frequented a certain port, consuls were to be found as early
as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in all the great ports of Italy, later
in Spain, and also in France at Perpignan, Aigues-Mortes, Montpellier
and, in the sixteenth century, at Marseilles and Lyon, the thriving new
centres of international trade. At first they were called ‘sea consuls’, then
‘merchant consuls’, and finally, when the consuls of France, for example,
were to be distinguished from those of other countries, they became known
as ‘French consuls’. In the Italian ports French consuls appeared later
than in the Ottoman Empire. They seem to have been royal officers from
the beginning, receiving. Like all office-holders. Tetters of provision’ signed
by the king: they were instructed to discharge their duties themselves and
not to delegate them except by royal authorisation. But under Louis XIV,
the posts having become venal, a General Farm of consulates appeared in
1683. Yet the Crown maintained the right to choose the occupants of
certain posts, such as the one at Alexandria, later transferred to Cairo.
Many obstacles had to be removed before consuls could be exchanged.
The resistance of the admiralty of Guyenne to the appointment of foreign
consuls at Bordeaux, on the grounds that they were an encroachment on
some of its privileges, was not overcome until after the peace of 1659.
Similar problems held up the exchange of consuls with the United
Provinces until 1662, and with Portugal until the French prevailed in the
treaty of 1667. In general, the installation of royal consuls in a certain
country indicated a substantial progress of French commercial interests.
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It is therefore not surprising, in view of the preponderance of French trade
in the Levant, that from the be ginnin g of the seventeenth century there
were four French consulates in the Lchelles : at Alexandria, Smyrna, Port
Said, and Aleppo. Their rights and jurisdictions were set forth in special
clauses in every agreement or ‘capitulation’ made with the Porte. They
were instructed by the great naval ordinance of 1681 — most important for
our knowledge of the consular service — to exercise their powers of protec-
tion and jurisdiction in the interests not only of the subjects of Louis XIV,
but of all Christians resident in the Ottoman Empire.
The institution of neutrality deserves special mention because it has
since altered considerably. The word and the institution were already
known in the sixteenth century. Exactly the same in the period of
Louis XIV as it had been a hundred years earlier, neutrality was very
different from what it became in later times. No principality had as yet
been granted a permanent status of neutrality such as, for example, the
Swiss Confederation has enjoyed since 1815. A country with reason to
fear for its safety might receive letters of neutrality from belligerent
powers, or perhaps from neighbours who foresaw war. Historians have
sometimes confused ‘letters of neutrality’ with Tetters of safety’. The one
may have been an offshoot of the other; the question has not been
sufficiently studied to permit of a more definite affirmation than that in
practice a guarantee of ‘safety’ was very similar to a guarantee of
‘neutrality’. In any event. Tetters of safety’, belonging to an earlier
period, were not to be found in the time of Louis XTV.
The characteristic feature of early neutrality was that, although any
State which undertook to take no part in hostilities might expect to be
protected from the evils attendant on war, it customarily allowed belli-
gerent powers to cross its territory on condition that they respected its
integrity, its independence, and the goods of its subjects. In short,
neutrality was governed mainly by the right of transitus innoxius (harmless
passage). This right was based on usage and not on international law, as
shown by the attitude of the jurists; Grotius, for instance, admitted
transitus innoxius but stipulated a variety of guarantees to protect the
inhabitants of the territories concerned, such as that troops should pass
in small contingents and that indemnities should be paid, if necessary in
advance, in compensation for inevitable damage. During the Thirty Years
War the Free City of Strassburg obtained recognition of its neutrality by
both French and German belligerents; but both used its bridge over the
Rhine until 1681 when the French occupied the city. The most significant
example in the reign of Louis XIV was the crossing of parts of the Spanish
Netherlands by the French army in 1672, on the eve of the invasion of
Holland. 1 Having no common frontier with the United Provinces, France
could make contact with the enemy on land only by crossing territory
1 See below, p. 215.
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belonging to Spain. French troops, massed on the northern frontier
around Charleroi, ventured over the border, apparently without meeting
the least opposition, and in several stages reached the bishopric of Liege
whose ruler was bound to the king by a treaty. There remained only
military problems, for beyond Liege lay Dutch soil.
Latin continued to be the principal language of diplomacy, but in this
sphere, as in others, its days were numbered. Already there were ex-
ceptions to the rule that all international conventions be drawn up in
Latin. Such exceptions were to multiply in the time of Louis XIV and
eventually to become the rule. It has been stated, incorrectly, that Latin
had already been abandoned by the time of the conference of Nymegen in
1678-9. Foreign courts were setting the example — in 1663 the Elector of
Brandenburg had a treaty drawn up in French as well as in Latin. Latin,
however, was used in the treaty between the French and Imperial govern-
ments at Nymegen; only the simultaneous Franco-Spanish treaty was
drawn up in French and in Spanish. It was not until the negotiations at
Utrecht in 1714, right at the end of Louis’s reign, that the Imperial
diplomats employed the French language in the agreements which they
concluded with France. Thereafter, French replaced Latin as the language
of diplomacy.
Much has been written on the foreign policy of France during the reign
of Louis XIV. In contrast with the preceding period, that of Louis XIII,
there is no lack of documents, for at this time they began to be regularly
preserved, being abundant especially for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and the Ministry of War. Yet until recently they have not been systematic-
ally explored and historical writing has been based on little more than
preconceived ideas. Thus it was asked whether the various enterprises of
Louis XIV, like those of Richelieu, had been governed by one central
idea. An historian of the mid-nineteenth century, Mignet, claimed that
the whole foreign policy of the great king had as its pivot the Spanish
Succession, while in fact this question dominated only the later part of
the reign. This, the most outstanding attempt at systematisation, owed its
short-lived success only to the talent of its author; it could not be taken
seriously today.
Less notable historians, mere publicists for the most part, have claimed
that Louis XIV had the ambition to complete ‘ French unity ’ by adding
to the kingdom all territories of French language and civilisation that
were still separated from it. It would be difficult to support such allega-
tions by reference either to documents or to events. The men of the ancien
regime had no notion of what we call ‘French unity’; in the annexation
of a new province they saw only an accretion of power for the kingdom
and for the king. Neither did Louis XIV and contemporary statesmen
subscribe to the celebrated programme of establishing the ‘natural’
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frontiers of France. The idea of the Rhine frontier, like that of French
unity, did not influence policy. Richelieu left a formula which helps to
explain the whole, or almost the whole, policy which he directed for more
than twenty years: ‘to stop the course of Spanish progress’; but we look
in vain for a neat formula of this kind which might be applied to the reign
of Louis XIV.
It is clear, however, that the principal motive which inspired Louis XIV
during the whole of his reign was the search for ‘glory’. He said so on
more than one occasion ; and this idea emerges also from some confidential
pages on foreign policy — albeit from the early years of the reign, especially
1 66 1 and 1666 — which, though written by one of his secretaries, he care-
fully revised and corrected in certain places. Unfortunately, he did not
heed the wise advice which a man of the preceding generation, Mont-
chretien, gave the sovereign of the time, Louis XIII, in a work rather
strangely entitled, A Treatise of Political Economy. ‘You have, Sire, two
great roads open to the acquisition of glory : one leads you directly against
the Turks and infidels, . . . and the other is wide open to the people whom
it will please you to send to the New World, where you may plant and
propagate new Frances.’ The quest for glory, then, took the place of a
programme for Louis XIV. He measured all the opportunities which
offered themselves during more than forty years in terms of their possible
yield of glory. A contemporary of his youth, the Cardinal de Retz, wrote
in his Mdmoires : ‘ That which makes men truly great and raises them above
the rest of the world, is the love of la belle gloire ’ Yet glory was to
be won only by victories, and therefore by war. War was to be the main
business of his reign, all the more, as he once remarked, because all his
nobility, who had no other occupation, urged him to war in which they
saw opportunities to distinguish themselves and to gain benefits. He felt
no scruple about declaring war, whenever a favourable opportunity
occurred, and he threw himself into it with a sort of joy. On his death-bed,
thus rather belatedly, he blamed himself for having ‘loved glory too
much*.
The France of his time was, according to the number of its inhabitants,
the greatest of the European powers. The king did not know this ; he could
only surmise it, there being as yet no statistics of population. Historians
have since calculated that there were eighteen or nin eteen millions in
France, as compared with perhaps five and a half or six millions in
England and as many in Spain, the other two great powers of the age. If
the first war, that of devolution, was directed against Spain, the following
war saw France fighting Holland, a tiny country whose fault in Louis’s
eyes was that it had dared to oppose France in the Spanish Netherlands
and by its signature of the Triple Alliance. He claimed, nevertheless, to
wage only ‘just’ wars; and he termed ‘just’ those which did not contra-
vene elementary principles of public morality, such as the maintenance of
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a solemn undertaking. It is only fair to state that he made ceaseless
efforts to keep his engagements, though with debatable success. The great
historian Ernest Lavisse could write that ‘ he broke nearly every promise
which he ever made’. This is too sweeping an accusation, for in reality
Louis XIV displayed a constant desire to keep his word, and he spoke
with sincere disapproval of statesmen who did not consider themselves
bound by their promises. What label would fit his extremely belligerent
policy which cost France so much blood? Lavisse baptised it a ‘ policy of
magnificence’, but it may more simply be called a policy of prestige.
France being the preponderant power in Europe, and the king being
conscious of his position as the first sovereign, it was essential that all
nations should bow to French superiority. If not, they must be forced
to do so.
One result of the king’s obsession with magnificence was that for his
diplomatic service he often chose men not for their proven ability, but for
their high rank which might uphold their position among foreign nations.
The French diplomats serving in Poland at the time of John Sobieski, for
example, showed a complete lack of intelligence ; they understood nothing
of the motives which inspired the king of Poland, and confused Louis XIV
concerning the real intentions of that prince. Although Louis XIV, as we
have seen, made considerable use of bribery, he appears, on the other
hand, to have somewhat neglected that other means of gaining influence
abroad — propaganda. Richelieu had employed teams of writers paid to
explain and, if necessary, to defend his policy towards other countries.
Louis XIV did not show the same interest and, although pamphleteers
were never more numerous than during his reign, they served above all
his enemies. The Dutch presses in particular flooded Europe with libels
directed against French policy. The writers employed by the Crown were
in most cases of little account, at least during the earlier and the successful
part of the reign. Towards the end, when disappointments and reverses
multiplied and the financial resources were exhausted, the role of money
diminished, and that of propaganda by the printed word grew steadily in
importance.
The personal responsibility of the king came into play only from 1661
onwards, for hitherto, during his minority, Cardinal Mazarin had con-
tinued to govern. It was Mazarin, therefore, who was chiefly responsible
for the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) which ended the long years of war
against Spain. Shortly before that memorable peace Mazarin concluded
a military alliance with England, according to which Dunkirk was to be
handed over to England after its conquest from Spain. Thus the English
co-operated in the siege of Dunkirk and occupied it in 1658. Shortly
afterwards, however, the monarchy was restored in England : Louis took
advantage of the financial needs of Charles II and recovered Dunkirk in
return for a large indemnity. Bargaining over the price continued for
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more than a year, but finally the sum of 4,000,000 livres was agreed on,
payable within three years; but only 3,500,000 (about £290,000) were
actually paid, and then the young king made a solemn entry into
Dunkirk.
In the same year the affairs of Lorraine furnished Louis XIV with the
occasion for a great diplomatic success. The duchies of Lorraine and Bar
bordered on the kingdom in two places, their western frontiers touching
the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun (annexed in 1552), and
their eastern frontier meeting Alsace, most of which had become French
in 1648. The French had occupied the duchies as a security measure during
the Thirty Years War; but by the Treaty of the Pyrenees they restored
them, retaining only the right of passage in certain circumstances. In 1661
Mazarin obtained explicit assurances that, in return for the complete
restitution of Bar, the strategic roads across the duchies would become the
exclusive property of the king. Duke Charles IV who ruled the principal-
ities refused to ratify these arrangements and continued to lead in Paris
the life of pleasure for which he had developed a taste during the last part
of the Thirty Years War. Also in Paris, his nephew and heir apparent
Prince Charles (the future Charles V) was preoccupied with the problem
of the independence of the duchies. These circumstances suggested to
Louis XIV the idea of a new convention with Charles IV, which was to be
called the Treaty of Montmartre (1662) because it was signed in the abbey
of that name, then in the hands of Mademoiselle de Guise, the last of her
illustrious family. On this occasion the place became a veritable market.
In return for a large indemnity Duke Charles IV consented to assign his
States to the king, so that on his death they would be permanently
incorporated with the French Crown. All the members of the House of
Lorraine, including the Guise branch of the family, were raised to the
rank of ‘princes of the blood’ of France.
The pride of the young king when he signed this treaty was not shared
by his entourage and there was much disapproval ; the deep respect for the
title of ‘ prince of the blood ’, which conferred certain claims to the French
throne, suffered a serious blow. At the same time that Prince Charles of
Lorraine saw himself disinherited, the princes of the blood, then the
highest magistrates of the kingdom and the members of the royal council,
protested vigorously against what they regarded as the debasement of
their rank. Louis was disappointed, but had the treaty registered by the
Parlement of Paris, which brought it immediately into force. Further-
more, he made immediate arrangements for French officials to administer
the ducal finances. The sovereign court at Nancy, however, intimidated
Charles IV by declaring the treaty null and void, and in 1663 he ordered
his officials to recognise the future Charles V, declaring himself released
from all his engagements by virtue of a supplementary clause that the king
had added to the treaty to appease the Parlement. Louis XIV endeavoured
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for some time to induce him to keep his undertakings and in 1663 seized
the small town of Marsal, but that was all: the treaty was considered
obsolete well before the death of Charles IV of Lorraine in 1675.
The annexations of Dunkirk and of Lorraine were not the only events
which marked the policy of the new king in his relations with foreign
powers. There was also the humiliation inflicted upon the Spanish govern-
ment and the papal curia because the king interpreted certain incidents,
arising from matters of protocol in London and Rome, as attacks on the
prestige of France and her king. In Rome an obelisk was built to per-
petuate the memory of the incident and of the reparations made. To so
proud a man as Louis XIV, the forcing of these two powers to their knees
was an auspicious beginning. Henceforth he believed that he was able to
do anything he pleased.
The first war of the reign opened in 1667. This was the so-called War of
Devolution, fought against Spain, the traditional enemy and the last
adversary against which France had pitted herself from 1635 to 1659.
The word ‘devolution’ must be explained: the right of devolution, which
existed in various principalities of the Spanish Netherlands, including
Brabant, the most important of all, meant that in the event of a second
marriage the inheritance devolved upon the children of the first bed, their
father remaining until his death no more than the usufructuary. The
French claimed that this right should be applicable on the death of
Philip IV — who was only to be considered as a usufructuary in the
Netherlands — and that his principal heir, his daughter Maria Theresa,
the wife of Louis XIV, should take possession of the Netherlands when
her father died. It is true that she had renounced in the Treaty of the
Pyrenees (1659) all her claims to the Spanish inheritance, but this renun-
ciation had been made dependent on the payment of a dowry within
eighteen months — and this was never paid.
The great question of the Spanish Succession had not yet arisen, but it
could be seen just over the horizon, and it never ceased to preoccupy the
French throughout the reign. From the first years onwards there was
speculation whether the Spanish throne would become vacant. What
excitement echoed around the world when in October 1661 the young son
of Philip IV passed away after a brief children’s disease and left only two
sisters! But the birth of another child was expected. It was the future
Charles II, who was to drag out an ailing and degenerate existence for
forty years, postponing the opening of the succession question for that
period. Had the child been not a prince but a princess, the history of
Spain, and perhaps of all Europe, would have been very different. In
view of the circumstances, Louis XIV hoped to have the Act by which
Maria Theresa had renounced her patrimony annulled immediately after
the death of Philip IV (September 1665), but long negotiations were
necessary to bring this about. An understanding had to be reached with
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the United Provinces which had their own views about the Spanish
Netherlands. This was soon done, for the Dutch had been friends of
France ever since she had assisted them in their war of independence, and
they agreed shortly before the death of the Spanish king that in this event
Maria Theresa should take possession of the Spanish Netherlands.
No one was able to foresee an impending reversal of Dutch policy. In
spite of an agreement in principle, the Dutch did not relish a French
occupation of a part of the Netherlands. Willy nilly, Louis XIV, informed
of the situation through diplomatic channels, accepted a compromise: the
Dutch were to leave him the southern part of the country, including the
towns of Cambrai, St Omer, Furnes and Nieuport ; in return they were to
obtain the entire coast up to Ostend. The negotiations lasted for a year,
while Philip IV was slowly dying and the Dutch hesitated to recognise the
pretended right of Devolution. After the death of the king of Spain a
decision had to be reached. The situation was embarrassing, since
England had just become involved in a war with Holland, and the Dutch
were demanding the support of Louis XIV according to the terms of the
defensive alliance of 1662. Louis, however, quibbled and invented various
pretexts for avoiding his obligations. At first he gave proof of his goodwill
by sending some troops to co-operate with the Dutch, who were engaged
in a war against the Bishop of Munster, and by promising naval assistance
against the English; but then he ordered all French warships to avoid any
conflict with English forces. Thus passed the greater part of the year 1666.
At the same time, diplomatic preparations were being made for the
expected war against Spain. England had to be treated tactfully, for it
was said in certain quarters that she was ready to support the Spaniards.
In fact, the colonial ambitions of the two powers involved them in con-
stant conflict, and Charles II of England, after years of war with Spain,
gave his support more or less discreetly to the Portuguese. Louis XIV
realised that a Portuguese alliance could easily be concluded if he would
only pay the price, and in April 1667 the Franco-Portuguese treaty was
signed which guaranteed to the French a profitable diversion of Spanish
attention for the time when hostilities would start in the Low Countries.
The Spaniards do not seem to have perceived the danger which threatened
them until too late, because of a certain lethargy which reigned in official
circles in Madrid. All was not yet ready, for the Empire had yet to be
neutralised. The Emperor Leopold I was the brother-in-law of both the
king of France and the king of Spain, but it was feared in France that the
old solidarity of the two branches of the House of Habsburg would once
more come into play. To win the neutrality of the Emperor, Louis XIV
looked for support in the Empire from those princes who were the clients
of France, especially those whose territories were near the Netherlands :
the Electors of Mainz and Cologne, the Duke of Jiilich and Berg, the
Bishop of Munster, etc. Thanks to French gold, the diplomatic efforts
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were successful and everything was ready by the spring of 1667, at the time
when the Anglo-Dutch War was coming to an end thanks to Swedish
mediation. Louis XTV avoided a declaration of war, sending to Madrid
merely a treatise of justification, Trade des droits de la reine Marie-Therese
sur divers fctats de la monarchic espagnole, in which he developed on
behalf of his wife the thesis based on the law of Devolution. Then, a few
weeks later, he issued a call to arms. Turenne was appointed commander-
in-chief, but the king informed his entourage that he intended to
accompany Turenne in order to inform himself.
With approximately fifty thousand men, Turenne marched north, in
the general direction of Brussels. The Spanish general, with no more than
about twenty thousand men, was obliged to sacrifice the most exposed
fortifications, blowing them up, so that the French entered the country
almost without firing a shot. Only a few places put up a semblance of
defence. The only organised resistance was at Lille where the fighting
lasted for a fortnight. After this, from the beginning of September, the
army prepared its winter quarters, while it became less and less likely that
the Emperor, hampered by the agreements of Louis XIV with the Rhenish
Electors, would intervene. Altogether, the year 1 667 was a successful one,
and it was not until the following year that the difficulties began.
The Dutch, in fact, did not play the part allocated to them in the
invasion of the Netherlands. An English diplomat wrote: ‘The Dutch
felt that once Flanders was in the power of Louis XIV their country would
be nothing but a maritime province of France.’ The Grand Pensionary of
Holland, John de Witt, sought to mediate, requesting to know on what
conditions Louis would agree to make peace. Repulsed once, he made a
second attempt, this time intimating the threat of an intervention in favour
of the Spaniards. Louis XIV then showed himself more conciliatory and
specified that in any peace negotiations he would insist on having, besides
Cambrai and a small part of Flanders, Franche Comte and Luxemburg.
Soon after this first exchange of views, Louis in his turn made some
proposals, the most essential of which became known as ‘ the alternative’ :
either the Spaniards would cede what he had demanded from them in the
preceding year and in addition would agree to make peace with Portugal,
or else France would keep all the territories conquered since (mainly Lille,
Tournai, Courtrai) as well as the places claimed previously, with the
exception of Luxemburg. These new proposals were received very coldly
by de Witt.
The reason was that he felt that England, his recent adversary, now that
she had made peace with Holland by the Treaty of Breda, was ready to
reverse her policy for fear of the growing power of France. If matters had
been decided solely by the needy Charles n, French gold would doubtless
have triumphed over English apprehensions; but parliament had to be
reckoned with, and parliament, very disturbed by the French conquests —
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Louvain was soon to be threatened — decided that some means must be
found to stop them. The result of this parliamentary stand and Sir
William Temple’s diplomacy was a new Anglo-Dutch treaty, signed at
The Hague on 23 January 1668, according to which the two powers were
to mediate between the belligerents. To give themselves time to bring
about a result, the two mediators demanded without success that hostil-
ities should be suspended until the month of May. Shortly afterwards,
they were joined by Sweden, and thus came into being the Triple Alliance
of The Hague. The king of France saw three Protestant powers turning
against him, powers with which he had maintained friendly relations
and even alliances for many years. It was a colossal setback.
The war ended in a singular fashion, with Louis XIV trying to settle in
advance with the aid of his allies the difficult question of the Netherlands.
He carefully worked out a project of which he naturally would have the
main benefit, and, in order not to commit himself openly, the Emperor
was informed of it by Louis’s intermediary, the Elector of Cologne.
At first the Emperor, not wishing to irritate his Spanish friends and
allies, prevaricated, but thanks to mutual concessions an agreement
in principle was reached in January 1668. Hostilities did not, however,
end there. In the dead of winter Louis XIV sent an army to invade
Franche Comte; in less than a week Besan?on surrendered to Conde and
Dole capitulated a fortnight later. Thereupon the English and the Dutch
demanded an immediate cease-fire, which had to be granted without delay,
especially as the two mediators had just joined forces by a permanent
treaty. The terms of the peace settlement, embodied in the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle (2 May 1668), permitted France to keep all that was
essential, her conquests in the Netherlands, and obliged her to restore only
Franche Comte. In his fury at seeing the little Dutch nation take the side
of his Spanish enemies, Louis swore that he would one day teach them a
lesson. This was the object of the war which was to break out in 1672 and
hold the attention of Europe for six years. During the years before its
outbreak the king endeavoured to isolate the Dutch diplomatically, while
continuing to wage against them the economic war which had been going
on since the beginning of his rule.
Dutch vessels were the most numerous not only in the North Sea and
the Baltic, but also in the Indian Ocean. In the Mediterranean the Dutch
colours had in part supplanted the French, and there was hardly a French
port where Dutch merchants were not both numerous and respected ; but
the result also was a smouldering hostility towards that nation. Fouquet
had been induced in 1659 to take a defensive step which had caused a great
stir: the establishment of a duty of 50 sous per ton on all foreign ships
entering or leaving French ports. Colbert committed himself to the same
policy. He estimated that the Dutch possessed fifteen or sixteen thousand
ships, whereas there were only three or four thousand in English, and five
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or six thousand in French service, and he soon denounced the evils of Dutch
competition. ‘As we have crushed Spain on land, so we must crush
Holland at sea. The Dutch have no right to usurp all commerce, . . . know-
ing very well that so long as they are the masters of trade, their naval
forces will continue to grow and to render them so powerful that they will
be able to assume the role of arbiters of peace and war in Europe and to
set limits to the king’s plans ’
The commercial war against the Dutch was thus a permanent feature of
French policy from the beginning of Louis’s rule. Twice, in 1664 and 1667,
the customs tariffs were altered to their detriment. Refined sugar from
Holland, which dominated the French market, was nearly excluded
altogether. The maritime trading companies, however, formed at Colbert’s
instigation, languished, and everything therefore depended upon the out-
come of the tariff war that broke out. In reply to the customs tariff of
1667, after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle the Dutch were continually
raising their tariffs, for instance in 1670 and 1671. Another element in the
conflict was the feeling of aversion that the Dutch nation inspired in
Louis XIV. They had committed the crime of constituting themselves a
republic, an unpardonable wrong in the eyes of this absolute monarch, so
proud of his prerogatives. The French monarchy, which we term
‘absolutist’, appeared to him to be a model. He had passed his youth in
the midst of the troubles of the Fronde and this exercised a profound
influence on his views. After the restoration of the English monarchy
Louis disliked the parliamentary regime and was shocked by the violence
of the parliamentary opposition; the Dutch, who had long enjoyed a
republican regime, suffered the same criticism. ‘These bodies formed of
so many heads’, wrote a secretary charged with the preparation of his
Memoires, ‘have no heart that could be warmed by the fire of beautiful
passions. . . .’
Nor did an aristocratic republic like Venice find greater favour in the
eyes of Louis XIV who more than once showed his bad feelings towards
her, especially because she felt attracted to the House of Habsburg rather
than to the Bourbons. In 1680 a Venetian ambassador in Paris summed
up the king admirably in a suggestive phrase : ‘ This prince is evidently
working towards universal monarchy and is not far from achieving it ’
In 1678 the town of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), a semi-independent republic
closely watched by Venice and by the Ottoman Porte to which it paid
tribute, attempted a rapprochement with France. Although its repre-
sentative, a senator, was a friend of Pope Innocent XI and on friendly terms
with Bossuet, this did not save him from being expelled from Paris shortly
after his arrival and forced to leave French territory. Ragusa succeeded
in escaping the Ottoman revenge thanks only to Austrian intervention.
There were, as has been shown, many causes of Franco-Dutch antagon-
ism. In 1672, on the eve of the rupture, the Dutch, exasperated by the
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new tariffs, decided on a total prohibition of French imports for a whole
year. This brought on the conflict. What was to be the attitude of the
other powers towards the belligerents? During the War of Devolution,
as we have seen, the struggle between France and Spain was interrupted
on the one hand by England, and on the other by Sweden, the third mem-
ber of the Triple Alliance of The Hague, while the Emperor Leopold I
had been courted simultaneously by the Dutch and by the French. At
the end of 1667, he had concluded with Louis XIV a treaty of neutrality
on condition that the forthcoming war would not take place on German
territory. In 1672, at the beginning of the Dutch War, he remained
neutral; w hil e the Great Elector of Brandenburg promised to assist his
Dutch co-religionists and the Archbishop and Elector of Cologne sided
with France. Having at first granted her the benefits of neutrality, he
later concluded a treaty of alliance which authorised Louis to use the
bishopric of Liege, of which he was the prince-bishop, as a base of
operations. He even placed an army of about eighteen thousand at the
disposal of Louis, who promised to maintain them. Shortly afterwards,
one of his neighbours, the Bishop of Munster, undertook to join his troops
to those of Cologne. The French took advantage of these agreements in
order to prepare their attack at close quarters. Louvois, in particular,
distinguished himself on this occasion. A Secretary of State since 1662
and jointly with his father, Le Tellier, responsible for military affairs, he
was also, since the death of de Lionne (September 1671), acting as the
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs while waiting for the return of the
newly appointed minister, the Marquis de Pomponne, from a mission to
Sweden. Louvois arranged for the storage of victuals and munitions on
the territory of Cologne; ironically enough, some of these had been
purchased in Holland. By the end of 1671 everything was ready so that
hostilities could begin in the spring of 1672.
The French passed unmolested through the Spanish Netherlands 1 to
reach Liege and from there to invade the United Provinces, their right
flank protected and if necessary assisted by the troops of the Elector of
Cologne. It was only farther to the south that precautions had to be
taken. On the left bank of the Rhine France possessed as yet only
territories in Alsace, acquired in 1648, and connected with Champagne
through strategic roads which were permanently under the control of
Louis XIV. 2 These roads ran through the duchies of Lorraine and Bar,
practically independent, owing to the fact that Duke Charles V had
refused to ratify the treaty of 1662. Therefore Louis XTV in 1670 had
taken care to establish military garrisons in the duchies. Nancy was to
shelter French troops for the duration of the Dutch War and the Lorraine
territories had to pay the heavy contributions demanded by the French
government.
1 See above, p. 205. 2 See above, p. 209.
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In the course of the Middle Ages a tradition of friendship had grown
up between France and her eastern neighbours which was based, accord-
ing to diplomats and statesmen, on an ancient blood relationship of the
Franks and the Germans. When the kings of France came into conflict
with the Habsburgs, they appeared in the eyes of the German princes as
the defenders of their traditional liberties threatened by Imperial ambi-
tions; but this stage was passed by the time of the Dutch War of 1672-8.
German opinion was surprised at the concessions made to France by the
Treaty of Munster, and henceforth began to be opposed to all French
expansion, even when it did not threaten German territory. The growth
of this hostile opinion was observed in 1673 after Louis XTV had been
making progress on both banks of the Rhine.
An important figure in the affairs of the Empire was John Philip von
Schonborn, the Archbishop and Elector of Mainz, who combined the
functions of president of the Electoral college and Imperial chancellor.
Possessed of a passionate concern for the public welfare, he devoted him-
self energetically to the cause of peace. He very early declared himself
against the influence of Spain, preponderant at the Court of Vienna, and
urged that the alliance between the two branches of the Habsburgs be
terminated. In 1658 he succeeded in having an ‘Electoral capitulation’
adopted before the election of the Emperor Leopold which forbade the
new Emperor to assist Spain either in Italy or in the Low Countries. 1
Then the archbishop concluded a defensive alliance with his neighbours,
which soon assumed the character of an anti-imperial pact, the League of
the Rhine, to which the young king of France adhered. 2 Many Germans,
however, accused the League of playing into Louis’s hands by preventing
the Empire from sending help to the Netherlands during the War of
Devolution; and these suspicions once aroused became stronger through
several incidents. Was not a small French detachment seen crossing
Germany in 1664 to subdue the town of Erfurt in Thuringia, a distant
dependency of the Elector of Mainz? In 1667 a bigger affair set off a long
quarrel between the nations : a lawyer of the Parlement of Paris published
a pamphlet entitled Des justes pretentions du Roy sur l' Empire, in which
German opinion perceived a whole programme. Such was the agitation
that the king had to send the author to meditate for several weeks in the
Bastille. Hostilities with the Empire appeared more and more likely, as
Louis XIV and the Elector of Mainz both realised. The latter proposed to
the Imperial Diet that an army of the Empire should be created, capable
of defending it instead of the Habsburg forces, but the particularism and
egotism of the princes defeated the proposal, while the French army
pursued the conquest of the Netherlands. The idea was taken up again in
1670 when Louis XIV threw himself on the duchies of Lorraine. At the
beginning of the Dutch War, the Elector of Mainz proposed a formal
1 Cp. below, ch. xviii, pp. 431, 446. : See below, ch. xvm, p. 431.
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alliance of all the princes in the vicinity of the Rhine; once again he
encountered the inertia of his compatriots and he died discouraged
shortly after the outbreak of hostilities. Moreover, in 1670 Bavaria
entered into an alliance with France, the Elector promising his vote to the
king in the case of an Imperial election. There seemed to be cause for hope
in this quarter. Germany was farther than ever from achieving unity.
While military operations were in progress the Dutch on several occa-
sions sent proposals for a settlement to Louis XIV. One of his ministers
wrote to the ambassador at The Hague: ‘It is well that they should con-
tinue to commit errors, for His Majesty will thereby be all the more
justified in the eyes of the world if occasion arises to let them feel his
heavy hand.’ After 1672, however, Louis refused to let himself be drawn
into negotiations, irrespective of whether the offers came from the States
General or from the chief magistrate of the republic: at first the Grand
Pensionary, John de Witt, then the representative of the House of Nassau,
the young William of Orange.
Holland found itself beleaguered almost from the first. 1 In agreement
with their French allies, the English attacked by sea, for by the Treaty of
Dover (June 1670) Charles II had become Louis’s pensioner and ally.
The eastern frontier was imperilled by the Archbishop and Elector of
Cologne and his ally, the Bishop of Munster. Two rivers, the Yssel and the
Waal, served in turn as lines of defence. Then the cutting of certain dykes
flooded the territory beyond, just as Louis XIV was arriving in person to
watch the army commanded by Conde making a spectacular crossing of
an arm of the Rhine. It was not long before the Dutch, besieged right in
the heart of their country, sent ambassadors to France to offer the cession
of certain towns as a preliminary to peace negotiations. Louis XIV
objected that the places offered would be difficult to hold and this caused
the failure of the negotiations. ‘Posterity, at its pleasure,’ he wrote later,
‘will cast this refusal upon my ambition and my desire to avenge the
insults that I have suffered from the Dutch I shall not attempt to
justify myself. Ambition and glory [i.e. the desire for glory] are always
pardonable in a prince, and especially in a young prince so well treated
by fortune as I was ’ The first phase of the war, in which Louis had
met with scarcely anything but success, had come to an end. The little
town of Bois-le-Duc, although it looked as if it would have to suffer the
same fate as the other captured places, could not be taken or even
approached.
All Europe was beginning to be concerned about the fate which
threatened Holland. The Emperor, in spite of his promises of neutrality,
finally ceded to the entreaties of the Elector of Brandenburg and made a
military pact with him (June 1672); their contingents advanced towards
the Rhine into the rear of the troops of the Elector of Cologne and the
1 For details of the campaign of 1672, see below, ch. xu, pp. 292-5.
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Bishop of Munster. Turenne turned eastwards in an effort to meet them
and to cut their communications with their bases; at the same time the
Prince of Orange, advancing far beyond Maastricht, laid siege to the town
of Charleroi which, however, he had soon to abandon on the approach of
French reinforcements. In the course of the following winter, a short
period of cold resulted in a forward movement of the French armies on
the frozen polders, but a sudden thaw in January 1673 forced them to
retreat. From that time the military situation of the Dutch tended to
improve. As a result of their persistent diplomatic activities, Sweden
intervened to offer her mediation and induced England and France to
agree to the holding of a peace conference at Cologne. But before the
discussions had begun they were broken off by Louis because he con-
sidered the Dutch proposals insufficient. It is significant, however, that
just then the French had at last taken Maastricht in a spectacular
operation which the king attended in person together with Vauban.
During the summer of 1673, Spain in her turn officially entered the war
in her Netherlands, thus isolating the French army. Shortly afterwards,
William of Orange broke through the curtain of troops which opposed
him, rejoined the Imperial forces on the Rhine and took possession of
Bonn, the capital of the Elector of Cologne. Louis XIV then had to decide
on a partial evacuation of Holland. At the beginning of 1674 the French
situation continued to deteriorate in both the diplomatic and the military
spheres; furthermore, England consented to make peace with the United
Provinces. 1 Most of the German States began to respond to the Emperor’s
entreaties and to support him against Louis XIV, and even the Elector of
Brandenburg rejoined the coalition. France, forced to fight on nearly all
her frontiers, was threatened by greatly superior forces. Before the end of
1674 most of the conquered places were dismantled and abandoned, the
war being waged mainly against the Habsburgs. To fight against the
Spanish hegemony was a tradition to which it was easy to return; but in
addition the occupation of Alsace had to be completed and the remaining
conquests in the Netherlands had to be defended. It was, indeed, a great
battle that was waged at Seneffe, near Charleroi (August 1674), where the
royal armies faced the Imperial, Brandenburg and Spanish armies; it was
a defensive, yet undoubtedly successful battle, for the Prince of Orange
returned to his Dutch bases. Although there were scarcely any French
troops left on Dutch territory after the campaign of 1674, Maastricht
remained in French hands, an advanced but isolated position.
These indecisive operations in the Netherlands continued for three
years. The city of Amsterdam, protected by the inundations, was only
threatened from afar. Yet the disorder in Holland was such that very soon
new peace proposals were made; and once again they were disdainfully
rejected. Gradually, however, the Dutch regained the initiative and in
1 See below, ch. xii, p. 295.
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1676 William of Orange attempted to retake Maastricht. This attempt
failed and was followed a year later by another defeat in open country
near Cassel. Meanwhile it was at last decided to hold a peace conference
at Nymegen; the entire year 1676 was taken up with questions of form,
etiquette and protocol. The first to negotiate were the States General who
received merely moral support from England, which Charles II was
unable to refuse to give in spite of all the seduction of French gold. In
addition, William of Orange had just won the hand of the king’s niece.
Princess Mary, and this led to an Anglo-Dutch defensive treaty of friend-
ship in March 1678. In view of this new stroke of fate Louis XTV
decided that peace must be made without further delay. He let it be
known in public that he would demand from the Dutch only a new
commercial treaty and no territorial concessions. Accordingly, the Treaty
of Nymegen (10 August 1678) restored Maastricht to the United Provinces
with the reservation that the Catholic faith must be preserved there. The
treaty with Spain, concluded the following month, provided for the
restitution of certain places on the northern frontier acquired in 1668,
others being substituted for them (Aire, Maubeuge, Ypres, etc.), which
facilitated the defence of the territory. In addition, Franche Comte was
confirmed as a French province. The economic difficulties which had
brought on the war were settled entirely to the advantage of the Dutch,
and the French customs tariffs of 1664 and 1667 were suspended. Colbert
was unable to get over this setback; soon afterwards, in 1683, he died.
The Empire was not a party to the treaty and did not accept the peace until
six months later when, still at Nymegen, it ceded to France the town of
Freiburg on the right bank of the Rhine.
After Nymegen there was a considerable interval of peace in western
Europe during which Louis XTV tried to intimidate his adversaries
without drawing his sword. This was the era of the Reunions (1680-3), the
name given to annexations carried out in peacetime by decisions of the
‘Chambers of Reunion’, which were set up at Breisach (for Alsace),
Besangon (for Franche Comte) and Metz (for Lorraine and Bar). The
government ratified the arrets (judgements) passed by these Chambers
which were instructed to confirm the king’s alleged rights in the territories
close to the frontiers. The most considerable annexations were the work
of the Chamber formed by the Parlement of Metz and instructed daily by
Louvois, who was perhaps the inventor of the system itself. The territories
seized as a result of the arrets of this Chamber came under the jurisdiction
of the Parlement of Metz and were attached to the three bishoprics of
Metz, Toul and Verdun or to the duchies of Lorraine and Bar, at least
until 1697 when most of the arbitrary annexations were annulled as a
result of the Treaty of Ryswick. Among those which escaped this revision
was the place on the Saar which was later fortified by Vauban and known
as Sarrelouis. The most distant territory affected was below Trier in a
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bend of the Moselle where the fortress of Mont-Royal was built; it was
restored with its surrounding territory in 1698.
In August 1680 French sovereignty was proclaimed over the whole of
Alsace, with the exceptions of Strassburg and Miihlhausen. Strassburg
was annexed to the kingdom in September 1681; it was still a Free
Imperial City, whereas most of Alsace, of which we have come to consider
it the capital, had already been annexed to the kingdom by the treaties of
Westphalia. A carefully prepared plan led to the entry of French troops
without a single shot being fired. The Imperial Diet, assembled at that
moment at Frankfurt, attacked France with angry words and even the
threat of another war; but it dispersed before these threats had given rise
to any action likely to interrupt the progress of the Reunions.
The destiny of the France of Louis XIV was to be decided in the
crucial region between the Rhine and the Scheldt. Pursuing the policy of
the Reunions the king turned upon the Spanish territories which were
affected by the arrets of the Chamber of Metz. In 1684 he sent the
Marechal de Crequi to besiege Luxemburg, which the government of
Madrid refused to abandon to France with the territory of the duchy of the
same name. Because the city refused to surrender it was blockaded. But
the siege was interrupted by an unforeseen event : it was learned that the
Turks had laid siege to Vienna (July 1683). 1 Louis felt unable to remain
entirely deaf to the appeals for assistance which the Emperor addressed to
all Christian rulers; he also felt embarrassed because of the good relations
which France had so long maintained with the Turks to the great profit of
the French trade with the Levant. He decided not to intervene, resigning
himself to being severely blamed abroad. When the danger threatening
Vienna disappeared, thanks to the sudden intervention of King John
Sobieski and the Polish army, Louis XIV rallied to the Dutch proposal of
a general truce between the Powers which was being studied by the
Imperial Diet assembled at Ratisbon. On account of new French suc-
cesses in the Netherlands, the conquest of Luxemburg and the occupation
of T rier, agreement was reached. On 1 5 August 1 684 the truce of Ratisbon
was concluded for twenty years, and France was left in possession of her
conquests, including the Reunions.
In the following year, however, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
(October 1685) revived dying religious passions both at home and abroad.
The Protestant powers allied against Louis XIV, while Germany was, as
usual, divided. The Emperor did not commit himself at first; but finally,
embittered by Louis’s continual interventions in German affairs, relating
in particular to the Palatinate, which the king threatened to seize on
behalf of his sister-in-law, la Palatine, he joined the league which became
known as the League of Augsburg. At its inception in September 1681 the
league had included only some Protestant powers : Sweden and the United
1 See below, ch. xxi, pp. 515-16.
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Provinces. Louis XTV secured the neutrality of the Elector of Branden-
burg by granting him a new subsidy treaty ; but Spain joined the league in
1682. The truce of Ratisbon was scarcely more than an affirmation of
principle — almost an act of goodwill — for long before it expired the War
of the League of Augsburg (1688-97) had come and gone. In the autumn of
1688 Louis invaded the Palatinate. After this sudden attack the Emperor
decided to break with France and war broke out. England did not join the
allies until after the Revolution of 1688, which broke out because James II,
a Roman Catholic, alienated a large body of opinion that was attached to
the Anglican faith. Because Louis XIV had chosen to invade the Palatinate,
and not the United Provinces, William of Orange was able to leave for
England with a fleet and an army. Under her new sovereigns, William III
and Mary, England lost no time in joining the League of Augsburg.
The new chapter in the history of France which began at this time has
been entitled by one author ‘the Decline of French Power (1685-97)’,
but this is a gross exaggeration. No doubt the most brilliant years of the
reign were gone. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes permanently
alienated the Protestant countries, among them two of Louis’s allies,
Brandenburg and Sweden. 1 To this notorious blunder he added what
some historians have called ‘bravado’, but which was in reality little more
than empty swaggering: he refused to follow the other sovereigns in
renouncing the right of asylum which the ambassadors of the great
powers exercised in Rome. Then, the pope having excommunicated the
French ambassador, Louis ordered the occupation of Avignon, the
ancient possession of the Holy See, and even threatened to send an army
into Italy. In spite of his advancing years — he had now reached his
fifties — Louis XIV more than ever believed any daring stroke to be possible ;
at the summit of his career, he felt that nothing could be refused to him.
His gloire still shone in all its brilliance. A commemorative statue in his
honour had just been erected in Paris (March 1686) in the square which
was henceforth to be called the Place des Victoires. Having been supremely
successful, both in war and by ‘legal’ methods of annexation, Louis did
not realise that he had aroused forces which France alone was unable to
withstand. In 1688 Louis stood at the summit of his power. The second
part of his reign was to bring about its decline ; his relentless pursuit of
prestige and glory had succeeded in uniting most of Europe against
France.
1 For the relations between France and Brandenburg after the Peace of Nymegen, see
below, ch. xxni, p. 554; for those between France and Sweden, see below, ch. xxii,
pp. 540-1.
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FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XIV
W ith the death of Cardinal Mazarin in March 1661 began the
personal rule of the young Louis XIV. During the eighteen
years which had passed since, as a boy of five, he had succeeded
to the throne, effective power had been in the hands of the cardinal, first
during the regency of Anne of Austria, and then for ten more years after
the king had attained his legal majority in 1651. The opening years of
Mazarin’s rule, down to the collapse of the Fronde in 1653, had been a
period of disorder, culminating in civil war. 1 Not only had Mazarin been
twice compelled to leave the country, but the absolute form of govern-
ment established by Louis XIII and Richelieu had been gravely threatened ;
there had been barricades in Paris, and with the hostility to absolutism of
the great nobles and the Parlements, the fate which had befallen the Stuart
monarch on this side of the Channel seemed for a time to hang over his
young French nephew.
Yet, thanks in part to the guile of Mazarin, the French monarchy
emerged from the Fronde stronger than ever before; five years of civil
war had brought nothing but devastation to considerable areas of France,
and the great mass of the population longed only for peace. The oppo-
nents of Mazarin were too disunited to continue the struggle; within
eight years of the collapse of the Fronde France entered upon the most
absolute reign in her history. In foreign affairs Mazarin had brought to
an end the war with the Emperor, begun by Richelieu, by the signing of
the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; two years before his death he had con-
cluded with Spain the Treaty of the Pyrenees which not only put an end
to a quarter of a century of war between the two countries, but marked
the end of Spanish hegemony in Europe and of the threat of encirclement
to France through the alliance of the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs.
Since his return to France in 1653 the cardinal had been all-powerful and,
laden with treasure, had led a princely existence, surrounded by all the
attributes of power and wealth.
The young king of twenty-two was determined that Mazarin should not
have a successor as prime minister; he at once made it clear that he
intended to govern as well as to reign, and that his ministers would take
their orders direct from him. It is true that at first he retained as his
advisers three men whom he had inherited from Mazarin: Lionne, an
experienced diplomat, Le Tellier, Secretary of State for War, and
Fouquet, the surintendant des finances. Fouquet, a man of boundless
1 For the events of the Fronde, see vol. iv, ch. xvi.
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ambition, had acquired under Mazarin great wealth of which his magnifi-
cent chateau at Vaux-le-Vicomte was the symbol: not only the interested
adulation of men of letters, but above all his connections in the world of
the aristocracy and of the tax-farmers, who had waxed fat on the compli-
cated expedients by which he had administered the finances of the country,
made of him a formidable figure. Yet before the year 1661 was out, he
had been arrested, his post abolished, and his place in the ministry taken
by his enemy, Colbert, another of the cardinal’s creatures. This merchant’s
son from Rheims was to remain in charge of the financial and economic
policy of the government from the fall of Fouquet until his death in 1683,
even though it was not until 1665 that he was appointed to the newly
created post of controleur general.
The period between Louis’s assumption of the reins of power in 1661
and the outbreak of the Nine Years War in 1688 marks the ascendancy of
France in Europe as well as the high point of absolute monarchy. Yet
historians have recently established that these decades of military glory,
of worship of the Sun-King, of imperishable masterpieces in literature and
in the other arts were far from being a period of economic prosperity.
For all the progress achieved in these years in the fields of commerce and
industry, the whole life of the country continued to be dominated by
agriculture. At a stage in history when the standard of living both of the
masses directly engaged in the cultivation of the land and of the upper
classes, whose main source of income lay in the countryside, depended on
the prosperity of agriculture, the period of low prices for agricultural
products which set in around 1660 and lasted, except in periods of
scarcity, into the eighteenth century, exercised a crippling effect not only
on agriculture itself, but on the whole economic life of France.
An English traveller like the philosopher Locke, who lived in various
parts of France between 1675 and 1679, saw therefore not only the
splendours of Versailles, complete with Louis XIV and his haughty
mistress, Madame de Montespan, and the bonfires which celebrated the
triumphs of French arms ; he also lived in a country in the throes of an
agricultural depression. ‘The rents of lands in France’, Locke noted in his
journal (1 May 1676), 1 have 4 fallen above half in these few years by reason
of the poverty of the people and want of money.’ This fall in the prices
of agricultural products, in an economy in which the accident of a bad
harvest could still mean not just hunger, but actual starvation for large
numbers of people in the regions affected, was by no means uniform.
The personal government of Louis XIV opened with a period of scarcity,
comparable, in the regions affected, with the severe crises of the latter part
of the reign, those of 1693-4 and 1709. In Paris the price of wheat, which
had fallen steadily since the end of the Fronde, rose to over 33 livres a
setier in 1661 and to nearly 39 in 1662; since these are average monthly
1 Travels in France, ed. J. Lough (Cambridge, 1953).
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prices, in both these years in the months of greatest shortage prices must
have risen even higher than this, before they came tumbling down to a
monthly average of just under io livres in 1673 and just over 8 in 1688.
At Angers on the Loire the pattern of wheat prices was similar; after
rising to 47 sous a bushel in 1661 and 38 in 1662, they oscillated between
about 28 and 14 sous during the rest of our period. In the south-eastern
province of Dauphine, in towns like Grenoble and Romans, the move-
ment of prices was somewhat different; in Grenoble the price of wheat was
as high in 1679 and 1680 as in 1662, while in nearby Romans 1679 was
also a year of high prices. At any given moment, in regions of France
separated less by great distances than by a primitive and expensive
transport system, prices for the different grains could vary enormously.
While plenty and low prices reigned in one district, scarcity and rocket-
ing prices could bring hardship, disease and death to the masses of a
neighbouring region.
Yet the general trend in agricultural prices throughout these three
decades was downwards. It is not easy to assess all the effects which this
had on the French economy, even in the sphere of agriculture. No doubt
the considerable part of the population which suffered severely when
bread prices were high secured some relief when they fell to a lower level;
but this was perhaps cancelled out by the loss of earning power brought
about by the general slackening of economic activity. If the burden of
feudal dues and tithes, coming on top of taxation, lay heavily on the
peasantry, the incomes which the nobility and clergy drew from the land
also fell and reduced their demand for goods and services. The letters of
Madame de Sevigne and her cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, contain numerous
allusions to the difficulties which they experienced in the i670’s and
i68o’s in selling the produce of their estates and extracting feudal dues
and rents from the peasants. It is against this background of low prices
and economic difficulties that we must consider the reign of Louis XTV.
Worse was to follow in the last twenty-five years of his rule, especially in
the catastrophic famine years 1693-4 and 1709; but we must bear in mind
that the whole period from 1660 to 1715, and even beyond, suffered from
low agricultural prices — with all that this meant in an economy still
dominated by the land — interspersed with bad harvests, rocketing prices,
and misery, even at times starvation, for the masses.
In examining the society in which Louis and his ministers carried on the
work of government, we must not be taken in by juridical labels. Theo-
retically that society was made up of three orders — the clergy, the nobility
and the Third Estate. In practice, though over against the masses of the
Third Estate (or roturiers) there stood the two privileged orders of the
clergy and nobility, the clergy, like the rest of society, was divided into an
aristocratic minority with what was already a near-monopoly of all the
best posts in the Church, and the great body of its members, drawn from
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the ranks of the middle classes and the peasantry. The essential division
was between nobleman and roturier. Yet this is not the whole truth : if, as
the Revolution drew nearer, it was to become increasingly difficult for
the wealthy bourgeois to climb up into the aristocracy, in the reign of
Louis XIV there were still several ladders up which rich members of the
middle classes might raise themselves and their families into the nobility.
The latter was far from being a closed caste, and the gulf between noble-
man and roturier was far from being impassable, as is illustrated by the
rise of the families of such ministers of Louis XIV as Colbert and Louvois ;
the same process, on a less striking scale, was going on throughout the
period.
The clergy, nominally the first order in the State, mirrored the society
of the day with its extremes of wealth and poverty. Some of the parish
priests, especially in the larger towns, were fairly prosperous, but the
great majority received only a miserable stipend and were often little
different in outlook from the peasants in whose midst they lived. Since
the best posts in the Church were used by the king to reward service to
the Crown they were mostly in the hands of the younger sons of great
noblemen or of the king’s ministers. Many of the archbishops and
bishops were first and foremost great noblemen who spent as much of the
year as they could, not in their dioceses, but in their Paris mansions and
the antechambers of Versailles, enjoying the social life of the capital and
keeping themselves in the king’s eye, on the watch for preferment or fresh
favours for themselves and for other members of their families. A
bishopric might be combined with a clerical post at court and with two
or three abbeys, carrying with them fat incomes. For other younger sons
and the daughters of the nobility all sorts of lesser posts in the Church
were available; for them too a vocation, while desirable, was far from
essential. The worldly lives of the court abbis, drawing often large
incomes from the posts which they held in commendam, are frequently
censured in the comedy and satire of the period.
Ranging as it did from the princes of the blood down to the parvenus,
who had newly acquired noble rank by purchasing lettres de noblesse or
an estate which carried a title with it, the nobility was an extremely mixed
class. The descendants of the old feudal families, the members of the
so-called noblesse d'epee, might continue to occupy high posts in the army
and to decorate the court, though, if they were to keep up the luxurious
standard of living appropriate to their class, even they were now largely
dependent on the king’s bounty in the form of pensions, gifts and lucra-
tive sinecures. The less fortunate members of the old nobility often
languished in the provinces in their tumble-down chateaux, too poor to
purchase a commission in the army for their sons or to provide dowries
for their daughters, let alone appear at court. There was thus an enormous
gulf between the different members of the old noblesse d'epee — between
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the dashing courtier, dancing attendance on the king at the Louvre or
Versailles, on the watch to snatch any vacant post or pension for himself
and his children, and the provincial hobereau, often of equally or even
more ancient lineage, whose fortunes had so far decayed that, but for his
pride in rank, he was indistinguishable from the peasants among whom
he lived.
Moreover a newer brand of nobles — the noblesse de robe — had grown
up in the last century or so, through the purchase of all manner of official
posts in the royal councils and in the high law courts such as the Parle-
ments. These descendants of wealthy bourgeois now claimed equality with
the most illustrious old noble families; in addition to having a large
amount of capital invested in their posts — now hereditary like the
nobility which they conferred — these men were generally wealthy land-
owners. Around Paris and such great provincial centres as Dijon or
Bordeaux the high civil servants and judges had built up for themselves
large estates. In addition to the feudal dues which they collected like any
other nobleman, they drew substantial rents from the land which they
had gradually acquired to round off their holdings. Keen businessmen,
they saw to it that, by fair means or foul, they obtained the maximum
return from the capital which they had put into the land.
The selling of official posts had opened up an enormous field of invest-
ment for the more prosperous members of the middle classes. Many of
these offices offered only a small income and modest social prestige, but
there were a thousand or two which enabled their possessors or their
descendants to enjoy the social prestige and the associated privileges of
noble rank. There were posts of masters of requests and councillors of
state from which the intendants and secretaries of state were recruited,
just as there were innumerable posts in the Parlements and other sovereign
courts. If the nobility of the holders of such offices was relatively recent,
their social position was strengthened not only by the possession of
landed property, but also by intermarriage with the older noble families.
The substantial dowries which they could provide for their daughters and
the influence which they enjoyed in Paris or in the provinces were attrac-
tions to the parents of prospective husbands among the old nobility. A
merchant’s son like Colbert could become the father-in-law of three
dukes, while the judges of the Paris and provincial Parlements were
frequently connected by marriage with the court nobility. The Marquise
de Sevigne, for instance, came from an old feudal family, but her grand-
mother on her father’s side belonged to the noblesse de robe, while on her
mother’s side her grandfather was a wealthy tax-farmer.
The mingling of blue blood and wealth in the society of the age is seen
also in the relations between the nobility and the world of the financiers —
men who, whether as treasury officials or tax-farmers, grew rich on the
financial needs of the Crown. The collection of both direct and indirect
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taxes, the raising of loans, and all manner of financial expedients such as
the sale of offices and titles provided a variety of avenues to fortune and
noble rank for men of often modest birth, but equipped with the necessary
skill and lack of scruple. Despite their wealth and their newly acquired
titles these sons of bourgeois or peasants (quite a number of the leading
financiers of the period are alleged to have begun their careers as lackeys)
were on paper separated by a mighty gulf from the court nobility. In
practice, the handsome dowries, with a high proportion of ready cash to
meet pressing debts, proved an irresistible attraction for the parents of
eligible young noblemen. The due de Saint-Simon, the author of the most
famous memoirs of the reign, was compelled, despite his fanatical attach-
ment to his rank, to confess that his duchess was the granddaughter of a
wealthy tax-farmer; her father had swallowed his aristocratic pride and
married the daughter of this wealthy bourgeois so as to be able to carry on
his career in the army and to buy an estate to which he could attach his
newly acquired title of duke. Again, in the letters of Madame de Sevigne
we can follow the story of how, in order to restore the family fortunes, her
daughter and son-in-law, the comte de Grignan, were compelled to marry
their son to the daughter of a wealthy tax-farmer; no doubt this was a
terrible blow to the pride of the Grignans, but they had to face the fact
that, given their tremendous debts, only a marriage with a wealthy
bourgeois family could save them from financial disaster.
These tax-farmers were not a popular section of the community ; they
were hated by the taxpayers who were the victims of their exactions, and
despised as bourgeois upstarts by the aristocracy. Yet the monarchy could
not survive without their assistance in raising money, and the riches
which they frequently amassed put them in the very wealthiest section of
the community and allowed them and their children to climb into the
aristocracy by the purchase of titles and by intermarriage. By this period
in French history the nobility had thus become a very mixed body in
which the descendants of the old feudal families were a decided minority
and had indeed often been saved from ruin by intermarriage with the
daughters of new men; while the majority of its members had been
recruited in the last century or so from the middle classes, thanks to the
system of official posts which conferred hereditary nobility, and of lettres
de noblesse which provided a title in return for the hard cash acquired in
trade or more frequently in the handling of government finances.
The ambition of a well-to-do bourgeois still remained to rise out of his
own despised class into the nobility. The road to great wealth lay as yet
not in trade and industry, but rather in the royal finances, while much of
the capital acquired in trade and industry was drained off into the pur-
chase of rentes, of official posts, of land and titles. The prosperous
bourgeois was only too anxious to leave behind such a despised calling as
that of merchant, and instead of applying his capital in new fields of
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enterprise, he would sink it in such unproductive investments because
they contributed to the social advancement of himself and his children.
Many writers of the time, comparing conditions in France with those in
Holland and England where the successful merchant was driven on by
ambition to launch out into ever greater enterprises in the pursuit of
wealth, pointed to the disadvantages from which French trade and
industry suffered through the contempt in which the merchant held his
profession; his one thought was to rise out of it.
Trade and industry continued to be organised largely on the basis of
the gild system, with a master working in his shop with the aid of journey-
men and apprentices. The regulations of the gilds laid down the number
of apprentices whom a master might employ, the age of their admission
and the length of their apprenticeship, the type of masterpiece which each
candidate for admission to the gild had to execute, and the methods to
be employed in the manufacture of the products of the particular trade.
The main aim of the gild was to establish a monopoly by eliminating all
competition, whether from its members or outsiders. In most large towns
the different trades were organised in gilds, though, despite the efforts
made by Colbert in these years to increase their numbers, since they were
a very profitable source of revenue, they were by no means universal.
Yet in the towns even the so-called free trades were in fact under the
supervision of the municipal authority, and the difference between a trade
organised in a gild and one which was not was probably not very great.
The technique of most trades had scarcely changed since the Middle
Ages, so that the greater part of the industry of the country continued to
be conducted on a small scale. In most cases the master would occupy
only a small number of rooms which served both as dwelling-place and
business-premises; there he worked with a handful of journeymen and
apprentices. All shades of wealth were to be found in the gilds, ranging
from the well-to-do cloth merchant or goldsmith down to such poorer
artisans as shoemakers and cobblers, who often had a hard struggle to
make ends meet as their numbers were very high in relation to the popula-
tion of the towns.
In two respects the gild system was showing signs of disintegration. At
the bottom end it was becoming more and more difficult for the ordinary
journeyman to attain the rank of master, a privilege which tended more
and more to be monopolised by the sons and sons-in-law of masters who
were favoured in all manner of ways. The result was the formation in the
towns of the nucleus of an industrial proletariat, still, of course, relatively
insignificant in numbers. Although the journeymen had their associations
(compagnonnages), which were the forerunners of modem trade unions,
and although the age of Louis XIV had its strikes and even revolts, these
were rare and sporadic, and were always easily and ferociously suppressed.
At the other end of the scale we see emerging in this period big mer-
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chants who stood outside, and above, the gilds. Trade, especially overseas
trade, made some progress despite the obstacles presented by the slowness
and high cost of transport and the dues which goods in transit inside the
country had to pay, both in the form of tolls on roads, bridges and rivers
and in that of customs duties which were levied by the tax-farmers on all
goods passing from one province or group of provinces to another.
Colbert, as we shall see, was to strive his hardest to stimulate both trade
and industry in accordance with the principles of mercantilism.
The total population of the towns, even when we have reckoned in not
only the middle classes and the artisans, but the masses of servants of both
sexes in an age when domestic labour was cheap, and the still numerous
class of people who were engaged in agriculture in the vicinity of the
towns, was still small in comparison with the millions of people who lived
scattered over the countryside or in villages and hamlets. The lot of the
peasants in our period is not easy to describe briefly, at least if one is
anxious to avoid the extremes of rosy optimism or black pessimism in
presenting the very complex facts. Then as now it made a great difference
in what part of France one was attempting to wrest a living from the
land — whether it was in the rich corn-producing regions of the north or
the mountainous or semi-mountainous regions of the centre and south.
Again, it depended on the type of agriculture practised; while it was true
that the fear of famine caused cereals to be cultivated in every region,
however unfavourable for the purpose, and while the vine continued to be
cultivated in districts altogether unsuited to it from which it has now
vanished, already the beginnings of specialisation were visible; the vine
was cultivated more intensively in certain favoured districts and there
winegrowers put most, if not all, of their money on one crop. The lot of
the winegrower could be very different, in any given season, from that of
other peasants whose main interest was in cereals or dairy produce.
From district to district as inside each community the amount of land
owned by peasants varied tremendously. A considerable proportion of
the land was in the hands of the two privileged orders, the clergy and the
nobility, and, especially in the neighbourhood of the towns, of the middle
classes. The clergy’s holdings varied sharply, from almost nothing to a
really substantial proportion of the land though, on an average, not nearly
as high a proportion as was once believed. The members of the nobility,
both ancient and more recent, continued to hold a considerable share of
the land, generally greater in the west than in the east, and a fair propor-
tion was in the hands of the bourgeois of the towns, who were often on
their way up into the ranks of the nobility. A significant area of land was,
however, the property of the peasants, subject, of course, to the feudal
dues exacted by the lord of the manor, lay or ecclesiastical; yet even
where the peasants’ share rose as high as 50 per cent, which was excep-
tional, their large numbers meant that the average holding was small.
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A few prosperous peasants might in a given village own a high proportion
of the land which was not in clerical, noble or bourgeois hands, but the
remaining peasants would be left with only a small plot or nothing at all.
There were similar differences in the amount of land rented by the
peasants. Most of the land in the hands of the privileged orders and the
middle classes was let out to tenants. Some of these were well-to-do
peasants with possibly a fair amount of land in their own possession, and
generally with enough capital to make a good living and to enable them
to pay a money-rent. But far commoner, especially in the centre and
south, were the ‘share-croppers’ ( metayers ) — peasants who owned little
or no land, and lacked the means either to pay a money-rent or to furnish
the seed, implements and stock necessary for the proper cultivation of the
land. These the landlord was compelled to provide; in return he received
a share of the crops, generally one-half. There was an enormous gap
between the poverty-stricken mitayer and the prosperous peasant land-
owner or tenant-farmer. Lower still in the scale — and a large group
in some regions — were the landless or nearly landless labourers, who
picked up a living as best they could by working for the better-off
peasants. ‘Talking in this country with a poor peasant’s wife’, Locke
wrote in his journal (15 September 1678) after a visit to Graves, the
famous wine-country near Bordeaux, ‘she told us she had three children;
that her husband got usually 7 sous per diem , finding himself, which was
to maintain their family, five in number. She indeed got 3 or 3i sous
per diem when she could get work, which was but seldom. Other times
she span hemp, which was for their clothes and yielded no money. Out
of this 7 sous per diem they five were to be maintained, and house-rent
paid and their taille, and Sundays and holy days provided for.’ 1 It was
peasants of this class who, along with their wives and children, provided
a reserve of labour for the domestic industry carried on, especially in the
north, under the control of the merchants of the nearby towns.
Despite all the differences between rich and poor, all peasants had in
common that they owed feudal dues and services to a lord. If some dues
had become much less onerous in the course of the centuries as the value
of money had declined, those which were paid in kind in proportion to the
peasant’s crops still remained a heavy burden. Moreover, they gave rise
to all manner of vexations, as did the lord’s monopoly of milling and
especially of hunting; the peasant’s crops suffered severely at times.
Moreover, feudal dues — paid in kind and in money — were not the
peasant’s only outgoings. There was the tithe, often collected not by his
cure, but by the agents of a chapter or religious house. Besides, the main
burden of taxation continued to be borne by the peasants. The taille, the
principal direct tax, was essentially a tax on roturiers and among these the
peasantry bore the heaviest burden, as the inhabitants of the towns fre-
1 At that time a sou was worth a little less than an English penny.
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quently secured partial or even complete exemption. There were great
inequalities in the incidence of this tax between the different provinces and
the different districts inside each province, and inside each village com-
munity these inequalities were repeated. Big landowners, for instance,
would use their influence to secure a reduction in the amount of tax levied
on their tenants — not from humanitarian motives, but so that they could
charge a higher rent. ‘This is that which so grinds the peasant in France’,
wrote Locke (26 May 1677), ‘the collectors make their rates usually with
great inequality.’ Indirect taxes also fell heavily on the peasants. Though
it varied enormously in its weight from province to province, the salt-tax
(gabelle) could be as heavy a burden as the taille. Other taxes, such as
customs duties and especially excise, were both vexatious and a hindrance
to the sale of agricultural produce, particularly wine. When wine prices
were low, as they seem frequently to have been in our period, excise duties
could both reduce sales and take away most of the profit on what the
peasant could manage to sell.
In assessing the ability of the peasant in the reign of Louis XIV to bear
the burden of taxation imposed upon him, we must remember that the
taxes which he paid, along with feudal dues and tithe, had to come out of
the produce of a still primitive agriculture. The land was left fallow at
least one year in three and, especially in the south, even one year in two.
When a crop was obtained, the yield was appallingly low, absorbing as
seed a quite disproportionate share of the previous harvest. Vast numbers
of peasants did not produce for the market, but confined themselves to
subsistence agriculture. Even in a year of good crops many of them did
not own or rent sufficient land to keep themselves and their families in
bread, the staple food of the masses both in town and country; like the
landless labourers, they had to spend part of their time working for their
more prosperous neighbours in order to make a living. In years of bad
harvests, such as occurred over a considerable area of France at the very
beginning of the personal rule of Louis XIV, prices rose to great heights
even in those regions where there was not an absolute shortage, with the
inevitable heavy mortality from starvation and disease. These high prices
the poorer peasant had to endeavour to meet at the very time when,
owing to the poor harvest, his own crops were more than usually inade-
quate and when, precisely because of the bad harvest, there was less work
to be had in the country. The more prosperous landowner or tenant-
farmer was better off up to a point — provided his own crops had not been
ruined and he had at least some sort of a surplus to sell at the higher
prices; but the grain needs of his family and other dependants, plus the
large amount which had to be set aside for seed and the amount carted
off by the agents of the lord and the clergy in the form of feudal dues and
tithes, would make serious inroads into his crop, unless he was exception-
ally lucky. The poorer peasants may have profited to some extent from
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the downward trend in agricultural prices; the grain they had to buy in to
feed themselves and their families could be obtained at lower prices. On
the other hand, the agricultural depression of these decades reduced the
amount of work available to the poorer type of peasants, who were not
necessarily entirely landless but simply dependent on a certain amount
of wages to make both ends meet. On the other hand, the better-off
peasants no doubt saw their prosperity diminished by the low prices which
they obtained from their produce; taxes, feudal dues and tithes bore more
hardly on them as prices fell, while those who rented land often found
that their rents, fixed in an earlier period of higher prices, now became a
heavy burden.
It would be wrong to imagine that there were not fairly prosperous
peasants on the land in the reign of Louis XIV ; but they were a minority.
Those with a fair holding of land or able to rent a sizeable amount (they
might combine this with the collection of the rents and feudal dues of a
nobleman or those of an abbey, along with its tithes) formed a rural
bourgeoisie, far above the mass of middling and poorer peasants. It was,
however, the latter who predominated, and in certain regions landless
labourers already formed a considerable army. The great mass of peasants
lived fairly close to subsistence level, and, given the primitive agriculture
of the day, went in danger not merely of hardship, but of actual starvation,
if the failure of the grain crops proved really serious. A sign of the times
was the continuance of peasants’ revolts at the very height of the reign of
Louis XIV. Sporadic and mercilessly suppressed, they still bear eloquent
testimony to the latent discontent which reigned on the land.
There was, of course, nothing new in these riots and armed revolts of
the lower orders of town and country ; they had been numerous earlier in
the century when the power of Richelieu was at its height. Yet it is
significant that the Sun-King in all his glory should have encountered
resistance to his ruthless taxation policy from beginning to end of his
personal government. Sometimes these risings had the tacit support of
the upper classes of the region, sometimes they were partly directed
against the feudal exactions of the local nobility; but, however varied
their origins, they show how unbearable many of the inhabitants of the
France of Louis XIV found their lot. Even if we leave aside relatively
minor disturbances, suppressed by hanging and the galleys, there remains
a series of regional revolts which called for the use of a considerable
amount of armed force before they could be suppressed. In 1662 the
introduction of new taxes in the Boulogne region led to an armed revolt;
in one pitched battle nearly 600 rebels were killed, wounded or taken
prisoner, and some 3000 persons were arrested. Several were executed
and 400 sent to the galleys. Two years later, at the other end of the country,
in the Pyrenees, there broke out a revolt against the introduction of the
salt- tax which lasted several years; it was led by a nobleman who was
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finally pardoned and given the rank of colonel in the French army. More
serious was the revolt which occurred in another region of the south of
France, the Vivarais, in 1670. Led by an ex-officer, the rebels, who had
been incensed by the system of indirect taxation, were finally smashed by a
large deployment of military force; a hundred or so were executed and
several hundred sent to the galleys. The new taxes made necessary to
finance the war with the United Provinces led to two particularly serious
revolts in 1675 — in Bordeaux and Brittany. In Bordeaux the lower orders,
supported by the peasants of the neighbourhood, compelled the governor
and Parlement to suspend the collection of taxes; as soon as the cam-
paigning season was over, the king sent a large number of troops to take
up their winter quarters in the province — a terrible punishment for the
inhabitants, who were now reduced to obedience, their leaders having been
hanged by the dozen. More serious still was the series of risings in
Brittany, where the peasants revolted against both the exactions of the
tax-collectors and their exploitation by the nobility. The repression which
followed the arrival of troops was brutal; innumerable executions took
place, and the soldiers robbed, tortured and killed as they made their way
through the province.
Such, then, was the France over which Louis XIV began to rule in 1661
and in which in the next three decades he was to bring absolutism to its
greatest height in her history. In considering the way in which he and his
ministers governed France in these years we have to remember that the
young king of 1661, ambitious, but raw and still unsure of himself, was a
very different person from the man who, matured by events and feeding
on success and adulation, led France into the Nine Years War in 1688.
He was not an exceptionally gifted man ; yet he brought to his metier de roi
the qualities of industry and self-control, a rough sense of justice, a
knowledge of men and an ability — shown from the beginning in the
comedy he played before the arrest of Fouquet — to hide his true feelings.
Physically he was endowed with a tough constitution, which stood up to
all manner of excess and to the medicine of his age, and with a handsome
presence which made him every inch a king; for all his politeness of
manner courtiers and soldiers would tremble when called upon to con-
verse with him. Until the death of his queen in 1683 and his secret
marriage with Madame de Maintenon he flaunted before his court a
succession of mistresses. When he passed through Paris in 1678 on his
way to the siege of Ghent, Locke wrote in his journal (7 February):
‘He was in the Queen’s coach with 8 horses. In the coach with the Queen
Madame de Montespan.’ These mistresses were allowed to play no part
in affairs, but some of their children he recognised and used to augment
his meagre legitimate family.
From the first the young king was determined to be master in his own
kingdom. He was king by the grace of God and responsible to God alone.
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However bad a ruler might be, any revolt on the part of his subjects
appeared to him an unspeakable crime. This was a far cry from the sub-
versive theories and the rebellious conduct of princes of the blood, great
nobles, the Parlements and common people in the civil wars of the Fronde
in which Louis had spent the impressionable years between ten and
fifteen. Now that Mazarin had disappeared from the scene, he meant to
see to it that he was not to re-enact the role which his father had played
while Richelieu had been in power. What is more, he broke with the
ancient traditions of the French monarchy: there was no room in his
councils for any member of the royal family, not even for the Queen
Mother, Anne of Austria, who during his minority had at least nominally
governed France. Louis’s younger brother, Monsieur, was all his life
excluded from any position of authority and was compelled to fritter away
his days at court. Louis also excluded from his councils the princes of the
blood, at whose head was Conde, one of the greatest generals of the age;
all prelates, for he did not want to see a repetition of the rule of the two
cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin ; and all great noblemen, even the great
soldier Turenne, except in times of war.
‘ Regne de vile bourgeoisie ’ is how the due de Saint-Simon sums up in his
Memoires the system of government under Louis XIV. The ministers whom
he appointed were men of relatively humble origin, who owed then-
position entirely to his favour and could therefore be relied upon to show
unquestioning loyalty. Under the new regime a considerable amount of
government business continued to be transacted in a series of councils;
but effective power was in the hands of the controleur general and the
secretaries of state who worked under the direct oversight of the king.
Among these officials a privileged few — a variable number, three in 1661
and occasionally rather more later in the reign— were summoned to the
highest royal council, the Conseil d'en haut, in which the king discussed
with them problems of foreign affairs and the general lines of internal
policy.
The outstanding ministers of this part of the reign were Le Tellier,
Secretary of State for War and then Chancellor, a post which he held
until his death in 1685; his son, Louvois, who succeeded him as Secretary
for War and dominated the government until he died six years later; and
Jean-Baptiste Colbert who gradually came to hold the posts of controleur
general. Secretary of State for the Navy and surintendant des batiments
down to his death in 1683. These were all new men — Le Tellier belonging
to the noblesse de robe and slowly making his way upwards through the
various royal councils, and Colbert a mere merchant’s son. The great
nobles had now lost every shred of power (during the whole reign only
two of their number were raised to the rank of ministers of state and even
then they played a negligible part in affairs); it was with the help of
members of the despised middle class that the new king ruled. These
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ministers were dependent on the king both for their position and for the
continuation of his favours to them and their families. Their services were
rewarded by their master with all sorts of honours and privileges. They
were allowed to grow extremely rich in his service; their sons were
permitted to succeed them or were provided with lucrative posts in the
Church, while their daughters married great noblemen on whom lavish
money gifts were showered; they and their sons were allowed to cover up
their middle-class origins by the purchase of estates and titles. Richly as
he rewarded them for their services, Louis was none the less determined
to limit their power; none of them was to be allowed to attain to the
influence and power which would make of him a second Richelieu or
Mazarin. This end, so he imagined, was secured by taking none of them
entirely into his confidence and by encouraging a keen spirit of rivalry
between his ministers and also between the different families of ministers,
the Le Telliers and Colberts. Every day he worked solidly for several
hours with his ministers, either separately or in council; but all decisions
were to be taken by him alone.
That at least was the theory underlying his government. The practice
was no doubt rather different. In the panegyrics of the time and in the
writings of some modern historians Louis appears as a demigod, settling
all the affairs, internal and external, of the largest nation in seventeenth-
century Europe with appropriate omniscience and wisdom, and dictating
the answers to every problem to his humble ministers and secretaries of
state. Despite his pride in carrying the whole government on his
shoulders, his decisions must often have been inspired by his counsellors
who, being better informed on points of detail, could present matters in
the light which led to the result they desired. All along the king could be
left with the impression that the decision was his, while his ministers in
fact very frequently had their own way.
In order that the decisions of the king and his counsellors at the centre
might be carried out all over the country, an administrative machine was
necessary. The highly personal form of government set up by Louis led
paradoxically, but inevitably, to the gradual establishment of a centralised
bureaucratic machine. The decisions of the central government were
carried out in the provinces (generalites) by the intendants who, like the
ministers and secretaries of state, were men of middle-class origins and,
since they were subject to recall at any moment, could be depended upon
to fulfil loyally their role as agents of the royal authority. The intendants
had already played a certain part in the government of France under
Richelieu and especially Mazarin ; but it was with Louis XIV and Colbert
that the central government systematically established its authority in all
the different provinces by employing these agents on a permanent footing.
It was only gradually that this institution developed, that the intendants
were assigned specific functions, and were given a definite district to
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administer until such time as they were recalled or sent elsewhere. It was
not indeed until 1689 that the province of Brittany acquired an intendant.
The functions of these officials — the ancestors of the modern prifets —
are summed up in their full title of intendants de justice, de police et de
finances. The intendant had to watch over the administration of justice in
his province so as to prevent abuses; he had the right to preside over any
court within his province, and in certain circumstances he could try cases
himself. A most important part of his functions was the maintenance of
law and order; he had to keep a watchful eye on the influential people —
the nobles, clergy and officials — who might abuse their influence to resist
the royal power. He was also responsible for the repression of all riots
and subversive activities. Aided by a number of part-time and unofficial
assistants ( subdelegues ) whom he appointed on his own responsibility, he
gradually took over a great many of the functions of the officials who were
concerned with the assessment and collection of the taille; he came in time
to direct the assessment of the different parishes in his province, to verify
the lists of collectors, and to assess people who had used their influence to
secure unauthorised exemptions from the tax or too light assessments for
themselves or their tenants. Finally, the intendants intervened more and
more in local government as the monarchy took advantage of the state of
indebtedness of the towns and villages to assume control over their
administration.
The new form of strongly centralised monarchy which grew up in the
i66o’s and i67o’s was superimposed upon the existing social structure and
political institutions; it did not destroy them. Though shorn of much of
their power, those institutions which had in the past imposed some check
on the power of the Crown still lingered on. The Estates General were, of
course, never summoned; but they were simply forgotten, not abolished.
The Parlements which, during Louis’s minority, had attempted to take
upon themselves the role of representatives of the nation in resistance to
absolutism, were no longer allowed to play any part in affairs of State.
Yet, though Louis did his best to humiliate them and render them power-
less, he did not formally deprive them of their right to make remonstrances
when royal edicts were submitted to them for registration ; what he did
was to strip this right of any real significance. In a series of edicts culmin-
ating in a royal declaration of 1673 he insisted that the Parlements should
register immediately all edicts without any modification or restriction, as
soon as they were presented to them, and only afterwards present their
remonstrances, if they had any to make. It was not until the regency of
Louis’s nephew, Philippe d’Orleans, that the Parlements were to regain
their political powers, a weapon of which they were to make more and
more devastating use as the Revolution approached. In contrast to the
prominent part which they had played in the Fronde, they were kept in
subjection throughout the entire personal rule of Louis XIV.
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Up to this time the provinces had enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy
which might prove an obstacle to the advance of the authority of the
Crown. Their governors had been allowed to build up a dangerous degree
of prestige and influence which, as the recent example of the Fronde had
once again shown, could be turned against the royal authority. To prevent
this happening again, Louis no longer appointed governors for life, but
only for three years at a time, a period which could be renewed if the
holder behaved satisfactorily. Since the renewal of their appointments
was made conditional on exemplary behaviour, the governors were
unlikely to attempt to stir up trouble in their provinces, as they had done
under Richelieu and Mazarin. Indeed, to make doubly sure, it was
Louis’s practice to keep the governors of provinces most of the time under
his eye at court, while many of their functions were taken over by the
intendants. Yet once again Louis did not abolish the old institution to
make way for the new; he merely rendered the functions of governor
harmless to his authority by reducing the post to a lucrative and therefore
much sought after honour with which to decorate princes of the blood
and great noblemen.
The towns still continued to enjoy varying powers of self-government,
although they had long lost most of the freedom which they had once
possessed. With the development of the power of the intendants the inter-
ference of the central government in local affairs grew. Here again certain
of the forms of self-government were permitted to survive, but most of the
substance had gone. In the end even the formal election of mayors ceased
in many cities, as they now became permanent officials who acquired
their posts by purchase.
The power of the intendants was less extensive in those provinces ( pays
d'etats) which had retained their Estates or provincial assemblies, to which
the nobility, clergy and Third Estate sent deputies. The most important
of the pays d'etats were Brittany and Languedoc. Their privileges were
greatly envied by the inhabitants of those provinces — the great majority —
which lacked Estates, because in general the amount of taxes which they
were called upon to pay was less in proportion to their population. Yet
it is doubtful whether in practice conditions were noticeably better there
than elsewhere in the country. The pays d'etats were never a model of
democratic government, because affairs were largely in the hands of a
wealthy oligarchy, drawn mainly from the ranks of the two privileged
orders; and the taxes were levied with inequalities as great as elsewhere.
These provinces did, however, possess the privilege of levying taxes them-
selves, and paying their share of taxation to the central government in the
form of a don gratuit, the amount of which was fixed by negotiation with
the king’s agents.
Such remnants of provincial autonomy were hardly likely to appeal to
Louis XIV. Yet once again he did not abolish the institution outright;
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what he did was to deprive the provincial Estates of any real power. The
deputies were bullied or bribed into submission. Moreover, Louis
abandoned the old system of allowing them to present the grievances of
the province before they proceeded to vote the don gratuit. More
important, he gave up the custom of asking for more than he expected
to receive and then haggling through his agents with the deputies as to
the final amount to be paid over. Now the king demanded a definite sum
which the deputies had to vote immediately; and from this time onwards
the amount constantly rose, without anyone daring to make the slightest
protest. Locke, who was in Montpellier during two sessions of the
Estates of Languedoc, wrote of them (8 February 1676): ‘They. . .have
all the solemnity and outward appearance of a Parliament. The king
proposes and they debate and resolve about it. Here is all the difference,
that they never do, and some say dare not, refuse whatever the king
demands.’ That such submission on the part of the Estates was something
new is well brought out in another entry (7 March 1677): ‘One of the
States told me that he was at an assembly twenty years ago when, the king
asking 7 or 800,000 livres tournois, they thought it too much and gave
nothing at all, but that they dare not do so now.’ Things had changed
since the end of the Fronde when this clash had occurred; now, with an
absolute monarch at the height of his power, there was nothing for it but
prompt compliance with his ever-growing demands.
Thus in the 1660’s and 1670’s all those institutions which might curb
in some degree the power of the Crown — the Parlements, the governors
of provinces, the provincial Estates and town councils — were gradually
' stripped of any effective power. The government was supreme both in the
centre and in the provinces. No one class, no combination of classes
could impose any effective check on the government machine. The mass
of the common people — the peasants, the artisans, all those below the
level of the well-to-do middle class — simply did not count in the eyes of
their rulers or of the upper classes. In practice, if not in theory, the Third
Estate was limited to the wealthier sections of the middle classes, the
rentiers, the officiers (holders of official posts in national and local govern-
ment, in the collection of direct taxes and the administration of justice), the
bankers, tax-farmers and merchants. It is true that some of the most
important officiers, the judges of the Parlements, had no cause to love
Louis, since he had deprived them of all say in affairs of State, but with
a strong king there was nothing for it but obedience. The king carried his
dislike of them so far as to try to reduce the value of their posts and to
make it more difficult for their sons to succeed them by insisting that no
one who had a father, brother or brother-in-law in a Parlement could be
admitted to that court; though such edicts remained a dead letter, the
judges were compelled to register them. It is likewise true that the less-
important officiers, those concerned with the collection of taxes and the
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administration of justice in the lower courts, were deprived of much of
their power by the growing importance of the intendants ; but their dis-
content was too insignificant to matter. In general, the middle classes
were the firmest supporters of absolute monarchy in this period. They
remembered the age-long alliance between the middle classes and the
Crown which had finally broken the power of the feudal nobility. Their
bitter experience of the futility of the Fronde had increased their loyalty
to a powerful monarchy which alone could give them security and
stability. Far from harbouring the subversive thoughts of their descen-
dants who, a century later, were to claim a degree of political power
commensurate with their importance in the economic life of the country,
they considered absolutism a fair price to pay for stable government apd
accepted the existing social hierarchy as something divinely ordained ; the
one thought of an ambitious bourgeois was to make enough money to
enable himself and his children to rise into the ranks of the aristocracy.
Of the two privileged orders the clergy alone possessed some remnants
of independence. Every five years its elected representatives met together
in the Assemble du Clerge. It paid no direct taxes, but made instead a
voluntary contribution, a don gratuit, the amount of which was fixed by
negotiations between the king and the assembly. Yet such independence
as the clergy possessed was severely limited. Ever since the Concordat of
1516 had conferred upon the Crown the right of appointing to all ecclesi-
astical posts of any importance, nobody who wished to make a career in
the Church could afford to incur the displeasure of a strong king. The
result was that, far from offering opposition to Louis’s policies, the higher
clergy were only too ready to play the role of courtiers.
As for the noblesse d'epee, their dependence on the favours of the king
finally completed the transformation of the aristocracy from the turbulent,
semi-feudal lords of the first half of the seventeenth century into docile
courtiers. The princes of the blood and great noblemen had had their last
fling in the Fronde; they no longer possessed the bands of noble retainers
and the small armies which, earlier in the century, had allowed them to
make war on the monarchy. Under Louis XIV they ceased to be in a
position to blackmail the king by threatening to leave the court and to set
up the standard of revolt in the provinces under their control. If a noble-
man left the court of Louis XIV it was because the king had exiled him to
his estates — a dreaded punishment which meant both the end of all
favours and a life of utter boredom.
As a matter of deliberate policy Louis made his court — in a way which
it never had been before and was never to be again in French history — the
centre of the social life of the aristocracy, at first in the Louvre and in the
other royal palaces in the Paris region and then, from 1682 onwards, at
Versailles which he had transformed from his father’s modest hunting-
lodge into a vast palace, the residence of a monarch who was absolute at
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home and, after his recent victories, supreme in Europe. Versailles was
the abode of the Sun-King with his proud motto Nec pluribus impar; the
very doors bore in gold the emblem of his greatness. The palace was
designed to appear to his subjects a temple dedicated to the worship of a
demigod. The daily life of Louis, and therefore of the royal family and the
courtiers, was regulated by the strictest etiquette, in contrast to the free
and easy atmosphere of the courts of his father and grandfather. The
greatest attention was deliberately paid to the regulation of the most
minute details of ceremonial ; everything here was of importance in Louis’s
eyes because it contributed to one great end, the exaltation of the king
above the rest of mankind.
To keep the nobles out of mischief he insisted that they come to court.
And the nobles came, not only because the life at court suited their taste
for luxury and entertainment, but because it was the only way of obtaining
the favours which the king had at his disposal. Unless they showed them-
selves at court, they had no chance of obtaining anything. ‘I don’t know
him’, the king would answer when anyone suggested the name of an
absent nobleman for any favour. Crippled by debts, often reduced to
augmenting their income by gambling and all manner of corrupt practices,
the nobles would spend their days at court on the lookout for some post
or pension which would bring them financial relief. To show their
assiduity, they would try to keep themselves in the king’s eye every time
he appeared in public — at his lever and coucher, or when he was on the
way to or from his council meetings or the chapel.
The proudest honour which a great nobleman could now receive was
to possess one of the high posts in the king’s household, or in those of the
queen and other members of the royal family; all of these gave rise to
endless intrigues whenever they fell vacant or were created as the need
arose. Besides giving such posts as a reward for assiduity and obedience,
the king would also confer pensions on favoured courtiers, or give them
lucrative sinecures, provide dowries for their daughters, rich bishoprics or
other high posts in the Church for younger sons, or even pay their debts.
The result was that the nobles were now entirely disciplined. Whatever
they may have thought in private about the abject state of dependence on
the king to which they were reduced, in public they outdid one another in
flattery in order to curry favour with the king, piling up fresh debts in
order to provide themselves and their wives with expensive costumes for
the magnificent fetes given at court, living a life of hypocrisy and intrigue
beneath a veneer of refinement and politeness, for ever on the watch to
snap up any of the favours which might be going. Louis had thus suc-
ceeded in reducing to utter impotence the descendants of the great noble-
men who had once been the most dangerous enemies of the Crown.
For the greater part of this period of the reign the finances and the
economic life of France were under the direction of Colbert. He never
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had things all his own way as minister. Quite apart from the difficulty of
winning the king’s approval for his policies, he was faced with the rivalry
and often open hostility of his colleagues. This was especially the case in
the last years of his life when he found himself supplanted in the king’s
favour by Louvois. Moreover, the practical results which he was able to
achieve were limited both by the wars on which the king embarked and
by the unfavourable climate of these decades of low agricultural prices
and economic difficulties.
There was nothing new in the economic theories of ‘mercantilism’
which underlay Colbert’s whole policy. 1 He aimed at creating a pros-
perous country in which the wealth and well-being of the people would
assure the greatness of the king. This aim, he held on orthodox mercantilist
lines, could be achieved, above all, by increasing to the utmost the
country’s stock of gold and silver. He was particularly impressed by the
commercial power of the United Provinces, a tiny country compared with
France, which none the less enjoyed great prosperity, thanks to its large
merchant navy. Colbert aimed at wresting this commercial supremacy
from the Dutch by building a large merchant fleet, by setting up new
industries in France and excluding as far as possible imports from foreign
countries, while at the same time selling abroad and transporting on
French ships the largest possible quantity of exports.
Colbert was fully conscious of the disabilities from which France
suffered in the sphere of trade and industry: the bad communications, the
the internal customs-barriers, the diversity of laws and weights and
measures, the lack of enterprise in the trading classes, their addiction to
the purchase of official posts and to the non-productive use of their
capital and, above all, the crushing burden of taxation. What he could
achieve in the way of reforms and economic progress was limited by the
obstacles inherent in the society of his day. As controleur general he
directed all his efforts towards restoring the financial situation. The legacy
which he inherited from Mazarin and Fouquet was a deplorable one: in
1661 the revenues for the following year and even part of those for 1663
had been used up in advance. Out of the 83 million livres paid by the
taxpayer, only 31 millions found their way to the Treasury; the difference
went for the most part into the pockets of the tax-collectors and tax-
farmers. In order to restore the situation Colbert made the financiers
disgorge part of their profits and also redeemed a large proportion of the
rentes, a step which, however unpopular, was highly advantageous to the
Treasury. By 1667 the gross national revenues had been raised to over
95 millions and the net revenues to 63: that is to say, in six years Colbert
had succeeded in doubling the effective part of the king’s income.
This result was achieved by a variety of reforms. He tried to bring
some order into the Treasury accounts, and he increased enormously the
1 For a fuller discussion, see above, ch. n, pp. 43-6.
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income from the Crown lands, particularly from the forests. He had
ambitious plans for a reform of the abuses in the assessment and collection
of the taille; he dreamed, for instance, of extending to the whole country
the form (a land-tax) in which it was levied in a limited number of pro-
vinces and of carrying out a survey of the whole country so as to be able
to assess the value of the land on a fair basis. In practice he was com-
pelled to confine himself to reforms of detail. He did his utmost to ferret
out those who had usurped noble rank and thus exemption from the taille
and to make them pay their share; he instructed the intendants to see that
the rich did not abuse their local influence to push the main burden of this
tax on to the shoulders of the less wealthy, and that the nobles did not
have the taille of their peasants reduced so as to be able to extract a higher
rent from them. These efforts met with only partial success, since such
abuses were so deeply rooted in the society of the time, in which, as Locke
said of the nobles ( Journal , 29 September 1676), ‘as well as they can, the
burden is shifted off on to the peasants, out of whose labour they wring
as much as they can, and rot lights on the land.’ Colbert would have liked
to do something to mitigate the harsh methods by which the taille was
collected, but here again his efforts bore no fruit. It is true that he reduced
the amount of the taille, but this brought little real advantage to the
peasantry, who had to bear the main burden, as indirect taxes were
increased to an even greater extent.
In short, Colbert’s plans for financial reforms came to little; the abuses
were too firmly rooted in the existing social system, and the wars which
arose out of Louis’s expansionist ambitions (and out of his own economic
policy) called for heavier and heavier taxation. As soon as the wars of the
reign began in 1667, money had to be raised by all manner of expedients,
and taxation, both direct and indirect, soon reached a ruinous level which
in turn hampered his plans for increasing the economic prosperity of the
country. Despite all Colbert’s expedients the net revenue for 1680 came
to only 61 million livres against an expenditure of 96 millions, which
meant a deficit of 35 millions, even leaving out of account arrears of over
12 millions from earlier years. His repeated appeals to Louis to reduce his
expenditure met with no response.
In the economic sphere Colbert sought an expansion of industry to
make France, as far as possible, self-sufficient. If old-established French
industries were to be further developed and new ones introduced, he saw
that it was necessary to have industrial undertakings possessing more
capital and greater productive power than the industries organised in
gilds. He set up or reorganised a number of manufactures royales, such as
the Gobelin tapestry works in Paris, which were owned by the State; but
more important were the private undertakings, bearing the same name,
which he brought into being by offering the entrepreneurs such aids as
subsidies, interest-free loans and a monopoly of a particular product in a
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given region and for a given period. Some of these new industries were
concentrated in factories; more commonly they depended partly or
wholly on domestic industry, employing the labour available in the towns
and among the peasants of the surrounding countryside to produce such
things as silk, cloth and linen, both for the home market and for export.
Colbert strove by every means in his power to increase the range and
output of French industry, from textiles to mining and metallurgy, not
forgetting the production of weapons and ships for the army and navy.
He introduced from abroad new machines and industrial processes as
well as skilled workers. At Carcassonne, for instance, Locke noticed the
successful use of skilled labour, imported from Holland, to build up the
local cloth industry: ‘They have got into this way of making fine cloth by
means of 80 Hollanders which, about 5 or 6 years since, Mr Colbert got
hither. They are all now gone but about 12, but have left their art behind
them’ (6 March 1677). He even reduced the large number of Church
festivals which interfered very considerably with production. In order to
improve the quality of French manufactured goods he laid down minute
regulations covering such matters as the preparation of raw materials and
methods of manufacture, and set up a body of inspectors to see that they
were observed. ‘The industry and commerce of a great country’, Adam
Smith wrote scornfully a century later, ‘he endeavoured to regulate upon
the same model as the departments of a public office . n
In order to protect these new industries against foreign competition,
Colbert placed fresh tariffs on imported goods. His first set of tariffs in
1664 was relatively moderate, but three years later he doubled them in
order to ruin the Dutch, the great commercial rivals of France. They at
once retaliated by placing heavy duties on French goods; and this eco-
nomic war finally led to armed conflict between the two countries in 1672.
The long war which ensued had very unfavourable consequences for
Colbert’s economic and financial policies; and in the end, at the Treaty
of Nymegen, he was forced to reduce his tariffs.
Colbert looked enviously on the wealth which England and Holland
derived from their great trading corporations, such as the English East
India Company. 2 Like Richelieu before him, he attempted to follow their
example by setting up similar companies in France. In 1664 he founded
the Compagnie des Indes Orientates, which was given a monopoly of
French trade with the East. Other companies were set up on similar lines
to trade with America and Africa, with the Levant and with northern
Europe. Yet, despite the example set by the king and the princes of the
blood, who subscribed to their capital, the middle classes were by no
means eager to risk their money in what seemed to them speculative
ventures. In the end the monopoly of the Compagnie des Indes Orientates
1 Wealth of Nations, Bk. rv, ch. ix.
* For these companies, see below, ch. xvn, pp. 398-402, 417-29.
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was withdrawn, and trade with the Indies was left open to all merchants,
on condition that they used the company’s ships and trading stations.
This company was the only one to survive Colbert.
Despite the unfavourable economic climate of the period, despite the
failure of the privileged trading companies, and the enforced withdrawal
of his high tariff system, Colbert did obtain some results, even though
they proved to be much more modest than those of which he had dreamed.
He did succeed in increasing the range of French industry and the quality
of its products, and if there were considerable economic setbacks between
his death in 1683 and the end of the reign, he had built for the future,
since many of his dreams of a greater and more powerful French industry
were to be realised in the course of the eighteenth century. He did some-
thing to improve internal communications; thus the famous Canal des
Deux Mers, linking the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, was successfully
completed two years before his death. The subsidies which he gave to
shipowners resulted in a considerable increase in shipbuilding, and in
course of time France developed a substantial merchant navy, with the
result that overseas trade, especially with northern Europe, Spain, the
Levant and the French colonies, greatly expanded, and France took her
place alongside the great trading nations, England and Holland.
Seen in relation to the past history and traditions of France the work of
Louis XIV and his ministers, from the time he took over power in 1661,
takes on a revolutionary appearance. The break with tradition which
absolutism at its height represented was in many respects a sharp one.
No doubt the process which had raised the French Crown to this climax
of its power had been very slow and gradual, extending over hundreds of
years, and in the seventeenth century the contribution of Henry IV,
Richelieu and Mazarin to the strengthening of its position had been
extremely important. But with Louis XIV firmly in the saddle the
monarchy raised itself, in its monopoly of power, above the princes of the
blood, the great nobles and all the other notabilities, whom it pushed
down into an equality of impotence with the masses of the nation. All
the traditional checks on the royal power — the Estates General and
provincial Estates, the independent powers of governors of provinces and
the town councils, the political and administrative functions of the
sovereign courts — all these were ignored or forced into the background to
make way for the uncontrolled power of the king. At the centre there was
no longer a prime minister of the stature of Richelieu or Mazarin; the
king entrusted such powers as he thought fit to a small group of ministers
and secretaries of state who, because of their modest origins and their
utter dependence on his favour, were his faithful instruments ; while in the
provinces the writ of the central government was translated into action by
the permanent establishment over the entire country of its agents, the
intendants.
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Yet, revolutionary as the new system was in several respects, supreme
as Louis made himself at this period of his long reign, there were all
manner of limits to his power and even to the changes which he sought to
effect. He did not alter in any fundamental way the society which he
found in existence when he took over power in 1661 . He left untouched its
deep divisions and its glaring inequalities, based on a subtle mixture of
birth and wealth; if he encouraged rather than hindered the upward
ascent into the nobility of the wealthiest section of the middle classes, if
he stripped the aristocracy of all political power and made it entirely
dependent upon himself, he left untouched its social and fiscal privileges,
with all the abuses and injustices which these involved. At all sorts of
levels the France over which he ruled was still very far from being really
unified. There was the chaos of weights and measures and, more import-
ant, the confusion of Roman law and innumerable varieties of customary
law. Economically, despite certain modest reforms of Colbert, the
country was still divided by a complicated system of internal customs-
barriers which were an obstacle to economic progress. There was no
uniform system of taxation over the country as a whole; each province
was taxed separately, with a different incidence of both direct and indirect
taxation, levied by different methods and with varying degrees of favouri-
tism or hardship. Some provinces had managed to hold on to their
Estates, for what they were worth; others had lost theirs, while the
majority had never had any such institution. The limits of the revolution
effected by Louis XIV are clearly revealed if we stand back a moment
and consider the picture of administrative chaos and fiscal injustice which
ministers like Necker and Calonne were to paint a hundred years later.
It was in fact left to the men of 1789 to complete the unification of France
and to effect a real revolution in the economic and social spheres.
Louis XIV in these years of his glory is often depicted as the answer to
the prayers of the mass of French people for a king who would be the
incarnation of royal authority and the order which it brought with it. No
doubt the masses were grateful for the contrast between the settled state
of the kingdom and the disorders and devastations of the Fronde; pride
in the military glory of these years of the reign no doubt strengthened
these feelings of gratitude and admiration, even if we do not take literally
the paeans of praise of the Sun-King poured forth by Racine and Moliere,
Boileau and La Fontaine, as well as a host of lesser writers. In the sphere
of the arts there was revealed — for instance, in the writings of * Moderns’
like Perrault in the 1680’s and 1690’s — a new feeling of pride in the recent
achievements of French civilisation, which was now felt to be superior to
that of Greece and Rome or of such modem rivals as Italy and Spain.
Yet if we do not question the sincerity of Louis’s panegyrists at this period
of the reign, we are left to wonder whether the mass of the French people
were as thrilled to be alive in these years as some subsequent writers have
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suggested. There are hints, and often more than hints, of discontent among
most classes of the community. The great nobles resented their exclusion
from the royal councils and their dependence on the king; the judges of
the Parlements and behind them the mass of lesser officiers were aggrieved
by their loss of power and influence through the development of abso-
lutism and the encroachments of the intendants. Wars meant a crushing
burden of taxation and the bitterly resented billeting of troops on the civil
population. The economic trends were unfavourable, and, rooted in the
backward state of agricultural technique and transport, was the ever-
present menace of grain-shortages, high bread prices, and even starvation.
The expectation of life for the masses still continued to hinge on the
uncertainties of the next harvest ; it was not until the next century that this
nightmare was to be lifted. A hundred years later, in the reign of the
unfortunate Louis XVI, the masses might have to suffer privations in
years of bad harvests; but they were at least spared the menace of famine
and disease which in the France of Louis XIV could carry off thousands
and produce a drastic fall in the birth-rate. A hundred years later there
were riots in years of bad harvests or for other reasons; but the reign of
Louis XVI saw none of the revolts, extending over whole provinces,
which, in the age of Colbert and Louvois, were the result of grinding
taxation and feudal oppression.
In these decades France was supreme in Europe. It is true that, as a
result of the Fronde and of economic depression, her population would
appear to have remained stationary or even to have slightly declined. Yet
with her eighteen or nineteen million inhabitants she was numerically by
far the strongest power in a Europe which was much less densely popu-
lated than it is today, and in which Germany and Italy were merely loose
collections of States, each with a total population much inferior to that of
France. Her chief rival was the House of Austria with its heterogeneous
possessions, which had a population of some seven millions; France
towered above the five (or at most six) millions of Spain and of England,
and the fourteen millions of Russia. Judged by modern standards, towns
were small ; but in the conditions prevailing in seventeenth-century Europe
a considerable number of French towns ranked as being of very respect-
able size, even though probably only two provincial centres, Lyon and
Marseilles, had reached somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 inhabi-
tants. If Paris itself, with a population of almost 500,000, was smaller
than London and came nowhere near containing some 10 per cent of the
inhabitants of the country, it was far and away France’s largest city.
Along with London it held a unique position in the Europe of that day,
being at once a great centre of communications and commerce, the seat
of the administration, and the undisputed cultural capital of a highly
centralised country.
When the landing of William III at Torbay in November 1688 once
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more plunged France and a great part of Europe into war, Louis XIV had
held the reins of power for twenty-seven years. The inexperienced and
unsure youth who had taken over power from Mazarin in 1661 was now
a man of fifty, sobered by over a quarter of a century of almost unlimited
power and responsibility, and yet bathed in an atmosphere of adulation
because of his past triumphs. The twenty-seven more years which he had
to reign were to bring him many setbacks and defeats abroad, while at
home the economic consequences of almost incessant wars were to com-
bine with agricultural depression alternating with rocketing bread prices
and famine to bring criticism of the whole regime out into the open. The
cost of his achieving such power both at home and abroad was to become
plain for all Frenchmen to see.
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CHAPTER XI
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF FRANCE IN
ART, THOUGHT AND LITERATURE
T he year 1660 was notable in the annals of French civilisation.
Moliere’s Les Precieuses Ridicules was performed in the presence
of the young Louis XIV, and Mademoiselle de Scudery published
the tenth and final volume of her Clelie, thus ending the four years of
expectancy and suspense in which her many readers had been held.
In the following year, France, disillusioned by civil wars and emancipated
from the dominion of an unpopular minister, Mazarin, eagerly welcomed
her young, energetic king, who gave promise of providing, in abundant
measure, that military glory and national prestige which were the best
antidotes to the national malady of /’ ennui. In literature, a brilliant school
of writers, endowed with intelligence and wit and supported by royal
patronage, was to discredit the more prolix and sententious of their
predecessors and to confer an enduring lustre on a court, the most
magnificent in modern times.
Yet the glory was to prove short-lived. Thirty years later most of the
great men had gone or had retired into obscurity. Moliere died in 1673;
Racine, who survived until 1699, was unproductive in the last decade of
his life; Boileau, on retirement to his suburban house at Auteuil in 1685,
could look back on his best achievements; La Fontaine, having lost his
patroness in 1693, sought refuge in repentance and theological studies;
even Madame de Sevigne wrote few letters after 1691, for in that year
she joined her beloved daughter in Provence. At court, the buoyancy and
vivacity of earlier years were replaced by a regime of sombre pietism, and
France seemed to follow the mood of her king. There was still, it is true,
much intellectual activity in France — who could prevent Frenchmen from
thinking? — but the lead was no longer taken by Versailles.
Centralised control of every sphere of life was characteristic of the rule
of Louis XIV. For the press there was the censorship, still exercised by
the Sorbonne, and by the government, acting through the Parlement de
Paris. Printing-houses in the cities were subject to licensing, and there
were occasions, as in 1685, when heretical books were publicly burned.
That the censorship of the stage was less strict than that of the press is an
indication of the king’s personal likings, but it should be added that, in
general, interference with freedom of speech was fitful and capricious;
moreover, the steady flow of books and pamphlets from abroad, parti-
cularly from Holland, helped to counteract the effects of the censorship.
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In other spheres it was possible to ensure greater uniformity. Louvois
created a disciplined army from what had been a rabble; Colbert regulated
commerce and industry and legislated for every form of activity, including
art; it was his object to bring even the highest imaginative effort within
the control of a royal institution. The French Academy had been founded
in 1634; then followed, in 1648, the Royal Academy of Painting and
Sculpture, which was reorganised by Colbert and the painter Lebrun. 1 As
Superintendent of Buildings, Colbert, with the help of the Academies,
prescribed the rules to be observed by artist and sculptor, with the result
that much of the imaginative life of the nation was as carefully cut to
measure as its cloth. On the other hand, the institution of these Academies
helped to raise the status of the artist. Hitherto, he had been a workman,
a member of a gild ; now, his association with a Royal Academy gave him
a professional standing. As for the skilled craftsman, he might improve
his prospects by a period of training in Les Gobelins, the royal factory
where tapestry and furniture were made, and a high standard of excellence
ensured by the personal supervision of the court painter and decorator
Lebrun. Only the actor was left out of this purposeful co-ordination of
talent. Louis risked the anathema of the clergy by his recognition of
Moliere; but, in spite of this royal support, difficulties were raised about
conferring Christian burial on the great actor-dramatist.
The most concrete expression of this concentration of talent is to be
seen in the palace of Versailles. In the course of the sixteenth century the
influence of the Italian Renaissance had been clearly evidenced in French
domestic architecture, especially in the chateaux of the Loire country; in
the next century much was done, notably by Henry IV, Richelieu and
Mazarin to embellish Paris, where the Palais Royal, the Pont Neuf and
the Luxembourg were such notable additions that Paris rivalled Rome as
a capital city. Outside the metropolis the greatest architectural achieve-
ment was the chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, designed by Le Vau, and
completed for the Minister of Finance, Nicolas Fouquet, in 1661. LeVau,
assisted by a team of artists, sculptors and decorators, succeeded in
making this edifice the most impressive of its kind in France, unmatched
in its magnificent interiors and elaborately planned gardens; but unfortu-
nately it provided the clearest evidence of that financial malversation
which in 1661 caused the downfall of this phantastic minister. Vaux-le-
Vicomte, designed in a style of Baroque more restrained than the Italian,
was the model for Versailles ; indeed, the artists, carvings, sculptures, and
even many of the shrubs were taken from the one for the service of the
other. The king, with his boyhood recollections of the Paris mob in the
Fronde, 2 was resolved not to live in the Louvre; so he commissioned a
number of artists to co-operate in the building of a palace which, if only
1 For further details of the French Academies, see above, ch. vn, p. 161.
2 For the Fronde movements, see voL rv, ch. xvi.
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by its size and cost, was an eloquent demonstration of what could be done
with an unlimited amount of public money. 1
The palace of Versailles, about twelve miles west of Paris, is notable,
not for grace of design (this has been marred by additions and changes),
but for its geometrically arranged gardens and its elaborate internal
decorations. The gardens were planned by Le Notre, and much labour
was spent in excavations to bring a water-supply to the fountains. The
Grand Apartments, for the personal service of the king and queen, were
decorated under the supervision of Lebrun in the years 1678-81. For
Louis, it was a stage providing a setting for the glories of his reign, an
emblem, not always of taste, but of over-rich, over-gilded display.
On the evolution of French pictorial art Versailles may have had an
unfortunate influence. Lebrun, a good decorator but a mediocre painter,
drew up a code of rules for the artist, 2 which, among other things, pre-
scribed the ‘postures’ best adapted for delineating the various passions.
The Academies helped to maintain this uniformity of precept and practice,
and a table of precedence was established of the models to be followed —
in sculpture, the Ancients; in painting, Raphael and the Roman school,
and after them Poussin. Venetian artists, such as Bellini, were to be
avoided because of their over-rich colouring; even more, Dutch and
Flemish art were ruled out, as too bourgeois and literal. Insistence on
such principles may well have diverted French pictorial art from its
natural course. Already, Poussin and Claude Gelee de Lorraine had
created a fine tradition in landscape painting, but as they spent the
greater part of their working lives in Rome, they cannot be regarded as
typically French. The same applies, though to a less extent, to Philippe de
Champaigne, the portraitist, who came under the influence of Port-
Royal ; 3 his later portraits, well-known in engravings, show the austerity
of the Jansenist ideal. To that extent Champaigne represents an aspect of
seventeenth-century life not particularly suited to expression in pictorial
art. Earlier in the century the three brothers Le Nain — Antoine, Louis
and Matthieu— -were producing work of a spontaneous and naturalistic
kind, notably in their peasant scenes ; and a similar integrity can be seen
in the paintings of Abraham Bosse and of George de la Tour. All these
artists gave proof of a power of individual characterisation; their work
has the fidelity and conviction of true art. In contrasting these with the
allegorical scenes used by Lebrun for the decoration of Versailles, one
cannot but regret the departure from the old simplicity and directness;
for, after all, in the scenes and people around him, however humble, the
artist is more likely to find inspiration than in the Jupiters and Apollos
1 In this and the immediately succeeding paragraphs the writer is indebted to Sir Anthony
Blunt’s excellent Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, Pelican Series (1953).
* Methode pour apprendre it dessiner les Passions.
3 For Port-Royal and the Jansenists, see above, ch. vi, pp. 132-4.
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who usually provide little more than conventional patterns for tapestry
or carpets. 1
It may, therefore, be concluded that where, as in architecture and
decoration, the inspiration or incentive came from Louis himself, the
results were at best mediocre. But there were other spheres, notably
drama, music and poetry, where the royal influence had more fortunate
results. For the assessment of these it is necessary to indicate some of the
elements in the rich intellectual heritage with which the civilisation of
France was endowed. There was, first of all, the influence of Montaigne.
Everyone read his Essays-, everyone was familiar with his cultured
scepticism, or pyrrhonism, as it was called; many disciples admired his
robust common sense and moderation, so sharply contrasted with the
excesses of the age in which he lived. Like many of his contemporaries,
he had derived from Pomponazzi and the school of Padua a disbelief in
miracles and revelation, an attitude which led, not so much to atheism or
agnosticism, as to a contrast between faith and reason, the two extremes
between which the mind may oscillate. Generally, he thought that
Christianity had failed to create a civilisation worthy of comparison with
that of ancient Greece and Rome, and accordingly he resorted to the
Ancients for guidance and example. With his meridional egotism and
keen appreciation of the sunshine of life, Montaigne, while admitting
acquaintance with the vexed problems of civilization, refused to allow
them to interfere with his digestion, an attitude which has commended
itself to many generations of Frenchmen.
Equally important was the influence of Rene Descartes (1596-1650).
To Descartes wisdom became the fruit, not of learning nor of experience,
but of a chain of unbroken sequences ; and religion, detached from revela-
tion and mysticism, acquired the sterile validity of an algebraic equation.
From the start, Descartes had taken the precaution of conciliating the
Church, which did not quite know what to make of this uninvited bed-
fellow; and until about 1730 (when the Newtonian system came to be
accepted and applied on the Continent) Cartesianism dominated European
thinking — pointing obviously to Deism or Agnosticism, but involving no
repudiation of accepted religious doctrines. This made it easier for the
system to filter through into the mentality of western Europe, and helped
to depreciate the imaginative or emotional element, without which there
can be no true art. In consequence, poetry, as we know it, suffered; or
rather, its place was taken by verse. Nor was this all. By its rejection of
learning and tradition, and the substitution of the reasoning faculty, the
whole field of philosophic inquiry was opened to all comers; we may have
no Latin, but we are all sure that we have common sense. An academic
passport was no longer necessary for travel in the world of thought. This,
the equality of intelligence, was the first of human equalities.
1 For further details of French painting, see above, ch. vn, pp. 160-2.
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Cartesian rationalism was strengthened by its association with Jan-
senism. 1 Briefly, the Jansenists, notably Nicole and Quesnel, were Roman
Catholics who adopted an attitude not unlike that of the Calvinists, in
that they dated their theology from the Fall and repudiated those aids to
salvation which, it was thought, the Jesuits were anxious to supply. The
Jansenists, insisting on their orthodoxy, remained within the fold, and
appear to have infected (for a time) even such staunch Catholics as
Bossuet with their Puritanism — for want of a better word. Hence, drama
and the stage (usually defended by the Jesuits) were bitterly attacked by
the majority of the French clergy as well as by the Protestants. As the
Cartesians dissected the mind, so the Jansenists dissected the heart; the
two together account for that self-analysis, that probing into the recesses
of human conduct which is so characteristic of the later seventeenth
century. Moreover, Jansenism implied a certain fatalism, since man’s
fate has been predetermined by divine decree, a view according well with
the Greek conception of necessity or destiny, two strands harmoniously
combined in the poetry of Racine.
Another great writer can be connected with the influences derived from
Montaigne, Descartes and Jansenism. Blaise Pascal (1623-62), whose
achievements in mathematics and physics are recorded elsewhere, 2 associ-
ated himself with Port-Royal des Champs, the headquarters of Jansenism,
because his sister was a nun in that convent, and because, like Descartes,
he had experienced some kind of revelation which he interpreted in terms
of ‘conversion’. His Pensies, noted on scraps of paper, were collected
and edited by his executors ; these detached thoughts, in spite of the fact
that they are not co-ordinated in any way, provide an interesting experi-
ment in what is called Apologetics. Up to a point, Pascal was little more
than a disciple of Montaigne and Descartes; right reasoning, he held, is
the only true guide to the conduct of life. Reason shows the extreme
artificiality of civilisation — truth on one side of the Pyrenees, error on
the other; justice is merely what happens to be established; climate and
chance determine a large part of human conduct. But while, in others,
these facts caused acquiescence or even a certain degree of amusement, in
Pascal they produced disquiet and depression. How few of our assump-
tions can be proved was the lesson he derived from Descartes; how few
of our fellow-men are saved was the lesson he deduced from the Jansenists.
Still more, Christianity, in contrast with other religions, as it insists on
certain states of mind, is very difficult to practise; indeed, much of its
spirit may conflict with the requirements of human physiology. These
requirements may also be opposed to reason, and so there is a continual
‘guerre intestine de 1’homme entre la raison et les passions’.
More than any other apologist Pascal was morbidly conscious of the
1 For Jansenism, see above, ch. vi, pp. 132-4.
2 See vol. rv ch. rv.
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difficulties confronting the acceptance of Christian doctrine and revelation
by the man of education. In this respect he presented a striking contrast
to his near-contemporary Bossuet, who enjoyed the felicity of attaining
complete conviction by the simple device of excluding everything that was
obviously incompatible with his beliefs. The Pensees were deeply con-
cerned with these incompatibles ; accordingly, in a spirit almost of despera-
tion, Pascal ranged against his own beliefs everything that could be said on
the other side, even if it had no more than a degree of probability ; and so
his evidence amounts to little more than a series of converging opinions,
all pointing in the same direction. He never attained to that degree of
certainty which his fellow mathematician Descartes claimed to have
reached ; indeed, at times he appears to imply that only by a surrender of
reason and a mortifying of the flesh could the soul attain peace. His own
peace of mind appears to have been affected by an overwhelming psycho-
logical experience, having consequences strong enough to resist the
physiological pull. Racine may have undergone a similar experience;
certainly many of the characters in his dramas are torn asunder by this
‘guerre intestine’. Although he lived until 1662 Pascal has no kinship
with the age of Louis XIV ; nor can he be linked with any of the great
traditions of Catholicism. He was indeed a ‘solitary’.
Inspiration, as Pascal understood it, is the fruit of solitude; wit, on the
other hand, is developed by contact with cultured men and women and
finds its natural expression in conversation. In the later seventeenth
century and throughout the eighteenth conditions favoured a high stan-
dard of conversation, because so many things which vex us today could
then be left to other people — war to the soldiers and sailors, menial work
to the servants. According to Boileau, it was not enough merely to write
a book, one must live and talk in the right society; according to La
Bruy^re the spoken word might achieve a greater perfection than the
written, because pronounced in circumstances (not capable of reproduc-
tion in a book) which gave it point and meaning. Hence a specialised
application of the word esprit. A poem might have esprit, not in the sense
that it was ‘ spirited ’, but because so many of its lines arrested the reader’s
attention by bringing together, in an unexpected and effective manner,
things not usually associated. This is what Louis XIV meant when he said
that Racine had lots of esprit, a conversational quality which became a
definite goal of literary art.
In all this the women were playing an essential part. The seventeenth
century did little to emancipate their sex; but, in France, the wives and
daughters of the dukes and peers had already emancipated themselves in
the middle years of the century, when the Fronde of the nobility 1 provided
them with opportunities for publicity. Match-making and memoir-
writing were the spheres in which the ladies of that period found adequate
1 For this, see vol. iv, ch. xvi.
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self-expression; but already in the earlier part of the century women had
brought people together in salons, that of Madame de Rambouillet being
a notable example. In these gatherings a man might try out his opinions
before expressing them in print, or he might become acquainted with a
new idea before it had passed into circulation; or he might write an intelli-
gent history of civilisation because his patroness complained that history
books are so stupid. The salons were an important and comparatively new
factor in civilisation. In order to conduct a salon successfully, a woman
did not have to be highly educated; all she needed was her femininity.
She could easily stir up emulation among her masculine devotees; she
would be likely to discourage coarseness or vehemence ; by an exercise of
mother wit, she could discredit extravagance and exaggeration. She might
listen patiently while an over-credulous abW kept repeating how many
steps had been taken by a decapitated saint, holding his head in his hand;
but she would break in with the devastating: ‘ Monseigneur, ce n’est que
le premier pas qui coute. ’ The Cartesian apotheosis of reason accorded
well with this domination of good sense in France, and helps to justify
Dryden’s remark that the French were better critics, and the English
better poets.
From the civilisation in which women were playing an important part
there emerged the philosophe, or intellectual inquirer, as distinct from the
professed metaphysician; hence also the vogue of more or less serious
books among idlers and society women, who formerly had been content
with gazettes and romances. La Bruyere may have had this in mind when
he said that, in France, the great subjects were forbidden, and so men of
letters had often to resort to satire or irony. These modes of expression
have always been less popular in England where, after 1689, Church and
State were comparatively tolerant; but it was otherwise in the France of the
ancien regime, where government and hierarchy always provided a back-
ground of actual or potential repression. On the principle that litera
scripta manet, the more daring spirits may have preferred the spoken word
to the published book; and so, in many salons, revolutionary maxims
may have been commonplaces long before the Revolution.
This socialisation of life in France, intensified by the domination of
Versailles, was reflected in the French language. Throughout the seven-
teenth century, as the vernacular was displacing Latin, men were ceasing
to be bilingual and had to adapt their mother tongue to requirements
which hitherto had been met, however inadequately, by Latin. The
significance of this was expressed by Descartes in his Discours de la
Methode : ‘If I write in French, the language of my country, rather than
in Latin, the language of my preceptors, it is because I hope that those
who use only their natural reason will better judge my opinions than
those who believe only in old books.’ This triumph of ‘natural reason’
over ‘old books’ was one of the greatest achievements of the century and
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was most clearly evidenced in the progress of science. 1 But it was not
accomplished without a considerable expansion of the vernacular which
had now to take over the task previously performed by an international
jargon. Inevitably, the process was a lengthy one, and many words, new
to the vernacular, retained such close associations with their Latin pro-
genitors that they never became fully naturalised in the language of every-
day use. Hence two vocabularies came into use: one for concrete things
and simple emotions, the other for abstractions and more recondite modes
of thought — the first simple and direct, the second often nebulous and
elusive, qualities not without their value in the academic world. Some-
times the one or the other of these vocabularies predominated in writers
who were contemporary or nearly so : for example, Bunyan and Dryden
in England, Moliere and Bossuet in France. Here is one of the respects in
which French exercised a strong influence on both English language and
thought — an influence by no means limited to the period covered by this
chapter — for it was through this medium that many Latin words con-
noting abstract ideas entered into English usage and so facilitated the
discussion of philosophic or semi-philosophic themes.
In this period also the French language acquired greater flexibility.
Already it had this advantage over English that it made freer use of the
subjunctive, simply by change of a few letters in the verb, so that one
might, even in the same sentence, pass easily from a categoric to a
hypothetical statement; whereas in English, where the subjunctive can
only be denoted in the inflexions of the verb to be, one is obliged to use
words like ‘ should ’ or ‘ might ’ in order to indicate the change of mood.
One consequence is that, in French, one can readily express oneself in
contours rather than in a flat slab, an immense advantage for the lucid
exposition of an abstract theme, since different degrees of emphasis or
implication can be employed, with no danger that the statement of a
contingency or of someone else’s opinion will be mistaken for an assertion
of categoric fact. Witness the example set in the Lettres Provinciates
which Pascal produced in 1656. The Letters were a brilliant exposure of
the abuses of casuistry. Their author was concerned to show the methods,
such as the half-truth and the deliberate omission, by which you can prove
whatever you want to prove, and his exposure was all the more effective
because so restrained. In achieving this, Pascal showed how formidable a
weapon is the French language, because of its suppleness ; he delighted his
readers with raillery and sarcasm, where earlier controversialists would
have indulged in vituperation. He showed, for perhaps the first time in
history, how easy it is to pervert truth and even common sense by a skilful
manipulation of words. It is significant that he suddenly stopped the
Letters, because, as a good Catholic, he feared that their success might do
irreparable injury to the Jesuits and even to the Church. He was right.
1 See above, ch. m, pp. 47-72.
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It was in the Lettres Provinciates that Voltaire and the philosophes found
a clear demonstration of the potentialities of their mother tongue; even
more, the theological absurdities, which formerly had been decently veiled
in Latin, were now exposed to the ridicule of the vulgar, in language as
clear as sunlight. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the scepticism of
the eighteenth century derived as much from the God-fearing Pascal as
from the agnostic Bayle; for a clever book written in French might, in one
period, endanger a vast theological edifice; as, in a later period, it might
prove a declaration of war on the ancien regime.
These considerations may help to clarify the distinctive achievements of
the French genius in the reign of Louis XIV. It is greatly to the credit of
the king that he exercised a patronage, without which the imaginative
achievements of Versailles might have been considerably less. This is
particularly true of Moliere. Louis perceived his genius, he conferred an
official status on his company of actors, he stood godfather to the
dramatist’s son and shielded him from interference and possible persecu-
tion by the clergy. J.-B. Poquelin, commonly called Moliere (1622-73),
was the son of a merchant upholsterer, a fact of some interest, since this
was one of the few instances of rise to fame from the ranks of commerce.
Moliere’s early education was good ; at the famous law school in Orleans
he acquired that intimate knowledge of law which was afterwards to
stand him in good stead ; and, like Dickens after him, he knew the legal
world and its underworld. He formed a company of players which toured
the provinces and in 1659 settled in Paris. His career was made by the
instant success of Les Precieuses Ridicules which the king witnessed in
1660; but his daring Tartufe (1664) brought on him the renewed enmity
of the clergy, and its public representation was forbidden. Then followed
in quick succession : Don Juan (1665), Le Misanthrope (1666), Le Medecin
Malgre Lui (1666), L’Avare (1668), Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669),
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), Les Femmes Savantes (1672), and Le
Malade Imaginaire (1673). It was while performing the leading part, that
of the hypochondriac Argon, in the last -mentioned play that Moli6re had
a seizure and died.
Moliere’s fame dates from Les Precieuses Ridicules, a one-act comedy
which ridiculed ‘preciosity’, or affectation of speech. Every civilised
nation at some time produces this literary excrescence. In France it was
preciosity, and the school which Moliere had in view was the salon of the
Marquise de Rambouillet who, from 1610 onwards, had opened the
chambre bleue of her house in Paris to those more refined spirits who
resented the vulgarity of the court. In this coterie certain words and
phrases acquired special favour, and a romantic world, having its own
conventions and heightened vocabulary, took the place of the sordid
world outside. In Les Precieuses Ridicules we have a fast, rollicking
comedy, in which the two young ladies Magdelon and Cathos are at last
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brought down to earth by the exposure of two bogus noblemen, actually
the lackeys of two honest suitors whom the young ladies had found dull
and commonplace. In the background are Gorgibus, father and uncle of
the heroines, who is unable to make anything of their extravagances, and
Marotte, the servant girl, whose caustic realism helps to dispel the
vapourings of her mistresses. But even Moliere did not succeed in
destroying preciosity, and in 1672 he again used the same theme in Les
Femmes Savant es.
Les Pricieuses Ridicules has been briefly analysed because it set the
pattern to which most of Moliere’s dramas conform: the interplay of
emotions and idiosyncrasies within the intimacy of family life. In France
family Life has always been secluded and sacrosanct; in penetrating its
intimacies, the dramatist achieved an intensity and relevance which other-
wise would have been unattainable. In these domestic dramas each
member of the family acts as a foil to the others — it may be the incon-
gruity of husband and wife, of parents and children, of brother and sister,
or of suitor and mistress ; and always the servant maid is the exponent of
that common sense fundamental in the French character. Within the
framework of the family Moliere ridiculed certain types, such as the miser,
the hypochondriac, the bourgeois aspirant to nobility, the neurotic pessi-
mist and the religious hypocrite; in laughing at these aberrations as the
dramatist depicted them, many Frenchmen were laughing at themselves;
and healthy laughter is one of the most sanative things in human life.
Nor did he spare the learned professions; indeed, Le Malade Imaginaire
is the most scathing indictment of the medical practice of his time, a
practice from which only those of strong constitution could hope to
survive.
Of this interplay within the family Tartufe is probably the best example.
It is scarcely necessary to say that the author was not attacking religion,
nor even religiosity, but the homage which vice often pays to religion by
assuming its outward trappings. In seventeenth-century France there had
existed, until the 1660’s, an organisation intended to enforce a higher
standard of morality and conformity, the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, 1
which did not hesitate to use the spy and informer against erring husband
or free-thinking citizen ; but its excesses appear to have caused its disband-
ment, though something of its spirit survived. In the two leading
characters — Tartufe and Orgon — Moliere showed how the religious cheat
can play on the minds of the simple; the first is the prototype of the
Stigginses of literature, while the second is the credulous victim of the
pietistic confidence-man. This process of ‘spell binding’ results in a
deterioration of the victim’s character, so that he fails to see that his wife
has been seduced by the villain; even worse, he forces his daughter to
marry Tartufe, who has broken up and corrupted the family. Moliere
1 See above, ch. vi, p. 132.
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was taking a great risk when he suggested that the externals of religion
might be no more than a cloak for gluttony and lust, and that such
iniquities might be ‘accommodated’ by recourse to a particular brand of
casuistry countenanced by the respectable.
Moliere, however, was much more than a satirist. His early career had
been one of poverty and struggle; he was saddened by domestic misfor-
tune, and a constitutional melancholy caused him to ponder deeply over
the mysteries of human existence. His laughter often concealed his tears.
His portrait shows a face not commonly found in the seventeenth century,
for the eyes are expressive of both humour and sorrow, and the face lacks
that complacency so common in the portraits of the period. Racine called
him le contemplateur. He found cruelty and injustice, not so much in the
abstract relations of men to men, as in the bonds of personal relationship.
These bonds often account for tragedy, as when an avaricious parent
thwarts the natural instincts of a daughter, either because her marriage
would necessitate a dowry, or because the choice of her heart is financially
undesirable. In this way he advocated one of the most elementary of
woman’s rights. Generally, he was the sworn enemy of those conventions
and prejudices, insistence on which accounts for so much unhappiness;
he was the friend of all that is genuine, natural and spontaneous. This may
in part be accounted for by the fact that as an actor he was, for the greater
part of his life, a social pariah; and few things are more likely to en-
courage individuality than ostracism. In this respect, and in the fecundity
of his imagination, he recalls another pariah, the English Nonconformist
Daniel Defoe: both of them ardent social reformers, both of them acutely
percipient of evils so difficult to dislodge, because condoned by the herd.
As man and dramatist Moliere is in striking contrast with Jean Racine
( 1 639-99)- Like so many of his famous contemporaries, Racine originated
from the professional middle class and might well have gone into Law or
the Church. But, instead of studying at one of the well-known colleges or
lycees, he went at the age of fifteen to l'£cole des Granges , a school close
to Port-Royal des Champs, dominated by that Jansenism so characteristic
both of the convent and of the group of laymen who had gathered in the
vicinity. For a time, Racine was the solitary pupil, so that there was a
certain concentration and even intensity in his education, a fact which
accounts not only for his minute knowledge of Greek drama, but for his
sensitivity and preoccupation with himself. His training included exercise
in the vernacular — an unusual subject in the curricula of that time; even
more, he imbibed from Port-Royal a sympathy with that austere Puri-
tanism and fatalism which were to influence so much of his creative
output. Racine’s ancestry included a Scandinavian element, which is said
by some writers to account for a certain callousness or even ferocity in his
temperament; while from French forbears he may have derived his
feminine delicacy and suavity. He had thoughts of entering the Church,
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provided he could obtain a good benefice; but, though he held for a time
a priory in Anjou, he had to give up the idea of an ecclesiastical career.
He showed himself a false friend in his temporary desertion of Port-Royal
and in his treatment of Moli£re who had befriended him in earlier days.
He had affairs with women, not always creditable to his reputation;
indeed, in these liaisons he showed a callousness sometimes attributed to
men who are supposed to have an intimate knowledge of the other sex.
In his analysis of a woman’s heart, particularly that of a woman in early
middle age, he revealed the connoisseurship not of the lover, but of the
anatomist. His was an unusual and not always likeable character.
Racine was also a mystery. The failure of Phedre in 1677 was due to
professional rivalry, organised and directed by that great mischief-maker,
the duchess of Bouillon (a niece of Mazarin), whom he may have
antagonised. The effect of this incident on the dramatist appears to have
been devastating. For the next twelve years he was silent; then another
woman appeared on the scene, Madame de Maintenon, wife of Louis XIV,
who asked him to compose a sacred drama, to be performed by the young
ladies of her seminary at Saint-Cyr. The result was Esther ( 1 689), followed
shortly after by Athalie', then another period of silence until his death in
1699. Meanwhile, he had married and had a family; he also made up his
differences with Port-Royal. It is said that he lost favour at Versailles
because of his veiled references to dictators in Esther and Athalie and
because of his openly expressed sympathy with the peasants; or he may
have undergone some psychological experience, similar to that which had
been accorded to Pascal, which obliged him to forsake the stage. These
things have occasioned many conjectures, some of them far-fetched.
What seems certain is that his genius, less easily appreciated than that of
Moliere, was shown in his penetrating exposition of emotional crises and
acute situations, executed with a remorseless logic and inevitable fatalism,
and expounded in verse, usually devoid of imagery, but abounding in
those antitheses which create a feeling of staccato precision and crystalline
clarity. There is nothing like it in English literature; Racine has never
been fully appreciated outside France.
That Racine had successfully explored the mysteries of a woman’s heart
is attested by the great appeal made by his dramas to the other sex. A
good example is Phedre, based on the Hippolytus of Euripides. The
heroine, Phedre, wife of Thesee and daughter of Pasiphae, falls in love
with her stepson Hippolyte, an illicit passion which she confesses to her
nurse and confidant, Oenone. The rumour of Thesee’s death raises false
hopes, and the sense of impending tragedy is deepened by Phedre’s dis-
covery that Hippolyte is in love with Aricie, and so jealousy is added to
the passions which wrack the mind of the heroine. In her self-analysis
Phedre detests her passion and dreads its pre-ordained consequences; in
vain her will struggles against fate. Hippolyte dies a violent death;
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Ph£dre takes her own life. Only a great artist could have redeemed such a
theme from banality.
This searching analysis of a woman’s mind is seen also in Iphiginie en
Aulide, Berenice, and in his later plays, Esther and Athalie. In February
1689 Madame de Sevignd attended a representation of Esther given by
the young ladies of Madame de Maintenon’s school at Saint-Cyr. To her
daughter she wrote:
I can hardly tell you how much I was moved by this play; it is something not easy
to represent, something which will never be matched; for it consists in a harmony
of music, verse, chants and actors so perfect that nothing is wanting; the girls who
personify kings and great personages seem made for their parts; one’s attention is
held, and the only regret is that such a beautiful piece should come to an end.
Everything in it is simple and innocent, sublime and moving. Its faithfulness to the
Holy Scriptures commands one’s respect; all the chants are suitable to the words,
which are taken from the Psalms and the Book of Wisdom; and, in their context,
they are of a beauty which one can hardly bear without tears.
Other spectators did not share this whole-hearted enthusiasm for the
play; indeed, some interpreted it as an allegory, with Esther as Madame
de Maintenon, Vashti, her rival, as Madame de Montespan, and the
arrogant Aman (Haman) as Louvois. The following lines of Aman, spoken
in Act m, were thought by some to portray the unfortunate relations of the
king with his minister Louvois:
He knows that he owes everything to me, and that, for his glory, I have crushed under
foot remorse, fear and shame; and that, wielding his power with a heart of brass,
I have silenced the laws and caused the innocent to groan.
It is possible that, by 1689, Racine, like so many of his intelligent con-
temporaries, was disillusioned.
There were two great writers who, though not mere devotees of the
king, were brought into such close relationship with him that their views
may be taken as semi-official pronouncements of the royal opinions about
history, politics and poetry. These were Bossuet and Boileau. The
character of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627-1704), who became bishop of
Meaux, was many-sided. Though of unimpeachable orthodoxy, he
sympathized with Cartesians and Jansenists in so far as these schools
favoured a stricter and more reasoned morality ; but, on the other hand,
he had no sympathy with the Quietists, a fact which led to his estrange-
ment from Fdnelon. As a controversialist, he made effective use, in his
Histoire des Variations (1688), of what was considered the weakest point
in the Protestant cause, namely its division into innumerable and usually
hostile factions, in contrast with the ostensible unity of the Catholic
Church. Nor did he make any secret of his view that, whatever else they
might be, Protestants could not be regarded as Christians, an opinion in
which the bishop was by no means alone.
It was in his capacity as tutor to the Dauphin that Bossuet completed
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two notable books for the edification of his royal pupil. The Politique
tirie des propres paroles de V Venture sainte provided the most ample
demonstration of the doctrine of Divine Hereditary Right, derived from
the Old Testament, wherein, it was held, God had provided a model to be
followed by kings and subjects . 1 The other book, the Discours sur
I'histoire uni verse lie, is an interesting example of the attempt to write a
general history of civilisation, with a complete explanation of why things
happen. For the bishop the answer was easy. Neither economic nor
cultural conditions, he held, have anything to do with the rise and fall of
empires, these changes being merely manifestations of divine will and
intention. God had revealed Himself only to Jews and Christians; even
the Greeks had been accorded but a small portion of divine beneficence;
all other civilisations were merely idolatrous. The history of humanity
was thus the record of the progress of Christianity, and it is significant that
the historical portion of Bossuet’s survey ended with Charlemagne. For
the author, as for most of his contemporaries, the medieval world pro-
vided little more than the twilight preceding the noonday sun of Louis
XIV’s reign. Bossuet’s histoire universe lie is the last important book of
its kind; his successors have been obliged to suggest other and very
different explanations, in language less magisterial and sonorous than
that which distinguished the bishop of Meaux.
In another branch of literature Bossuet achieved uncontested pre-
eminence, the Oraison funebre, or funeral oration, commemorating the
virtues of a deceased person, always a notability. Few forms of composi-
tion are more likely to be insincere than the obituary notice of a celebrity
because it is an occasion when flattery can do no harm, and we are all
agreed in our respect for virtue; but the old type of funeral oration had at
least this to be said for it that it was intended, not merely as a contribution
to an already loud chorus, but as an opportunity for inculcating moral
lessons derived from the example set by the deceased. Bossuet’s pre-
decessors in this highly specialised branch of literature had often been
characterised by their use of forced or even absurd similes, and their
funeral sermons did not always have the dignity which the occasion
demanded: a fault which cannot be imputed to the bishop of Meaux,
whose obituary sermons have not only dignity, but even a certain majesty.
His main theme was the contrast between the vanity of earthly life and the
eternity of the soul; to him. Death was as much the Destroyer as the
Deliverer; and it was in its presence that he most clearly expounded the
essentials of his Catholicism, essentials to be practised in the details of
everyday life. His was a theological system which allowed no room for
doubt, but much for example, whether of the living or the dead ; and in
this way Bossuet was the semi-official exponent of much that was best in
the religion of his time.
1 For Bossuet and the theory of Divine Right, see above, ch. v, pp. 99-102.
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Another semi-official expositor was Boileau-Despreaux (1636-1711),
whose realm was poetry and taste. The son of a registrar, he attended the
College de Beauvais in Paris, where he studied theology and law. After
serving for a time in the Parlement de Paris, he devoted himself to
literature, and speedily won recognition by his satires and his translation
of Longinus, On the Sublime. In 1673, after years of careful revision, he
published his Art Poetique, followed by Le Lutrin. In 1677 he was
appointed together with Racine historiographer of the king, and in 1684
he was elected to the French Academy. In the contest of Ancients and
Moderns, he sided with the Ancients, for his master was Horace, with
whom he had much in common; indeed, it has been held that if you have
anything worth saying, it has already been said much better by one of
these two. In 1685 Boileau retired to his suburban house at Auteuil,
where he never again experienced the inspiration of his earlier years, passed
in the heart of the old Paris, under the shadows of the Sainte-Chapelle and
the Palais de Justice, that quartier which later was to harbour Voltaire.
Like Samuel Johnson, he was essentially a town dweller, to whom streams
and fields were monotonous, and mountains abhorrent; like Johnson
also, he lived almost solely for conversation and literature. The one was
a staunch defender of English common sense and conservatism, the other
of 1' esprit franfais and of that impeccability of expression which comes
only from devotion to literature as a serious, whole-time pursuit.
Boileau applied his exacting standards to all that was naive or fatuous
in the French literature of the two preceding generations; generations
which, it is true, had included Corneille and Scarron, but also many
mediocrities who had little more than membership of the French Academy
to their credit. Among his immediate predecessors were many who had
handled heroic or biblical subjects on the principle that length com-
pensates for lack of inspiration ; thus Moses, David, Clovis and St Louis
had accounted for epics distinguished only for their edification, until in
1665 Chapelain came forward with La Puce lie in 24,000 verses. It was not
difficult to burst these bubbles. This was effected in Le Lutrin (The
Lectern), based on an actual series of incidents in the Sainte-Chapelle,
involving two ecclesiastics, one of whom had objected that a lectern
obscured his view of the choir. This was the origin of a titanic contest
between two factions in the chapter. A specially large lectern was built
and installed in order to obscure even more completely the view of the
complainant ; from words they came to blows, and there ensued a battle
of the books, in which the folios of dreary epics and obscurantist com-
mentaries provided the heavy guns brought up against the light artillery
of octavos, including the ten volumes of Mademoiselle de Scudery’s
Clelie. Like Voltaire, Boileau never neglected an opportunity for raillery,
all the more welcome if his shafts hit two targets at the same time. Le
Lutrin was a demonstration that seventeenth-century France was too old
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for an epic; indeed, by using grandiloquent language of ridiculous
incidents, Boileau completely discredited those of his predecessors who,
in less heroic times, had tried to perpetuate the muse of Homer and Virgil.
He thereby insisted that poetry should be an expression of the age in
which the poet lives. He also used the opportunity of satirising the
clergy — their petty quarrels, their good appetites, their insistence on the
deference due to themselves. Like so many educated French Catholics of
his day, Boileau observed Easter, attended Mass, and ridiculed the
hierarchy.
More important is L'Art Podtique. Though little more than a thousand
lines in length, it had taken five years to complete. Drafts were submitted
to friends for their opinion, and portions of the poem were read to the
king who expressed his approval ; accordingly, this poem may be regarded
as a semi-official exposition of Classicism as it came to be understood in
western Europe. The debt to Horace is obvious, but L'Art Poetique is
much more than a mere reproduction, and it abounds in lines that are
both easy to remember and worth remembering. Its chief injunction is
that to write well you must think well — your thought must be of the
logical Cartesian type, in which you proceed from one certitude to
another. Nature, reason and truth, each an expression of the others,
these provide the indivisible trinity of the poet’s creed. The devotee of the
art should be a cultivated as well as an educated man; he should have
rounded off the corners of his temperament by contact with polite society,
including female society. Conversation of the right kind is thus an
essential amenity on the slopes of Parnassus, and well-balanced alexan-
drines take the place of those convulsive hexameters in which the oracle
of Delphi had found ambiguous expression. The poet is not a visionary,
but a social animal; and his compositions should have the aptness, the
concision and the wit of the good talker. Inspiration there must be, but it
should be rigidly controlled; the form must achieve that perfection which
comes from long, skilful polishing ; there must be no mediocre poems, as
there are no mediocre diamonds. ‘ Qui ne sait se bomer ne sait jamais
ecrire’; or, as Pope said, the last and greatest art is the art ‘to blot’, that
is, to cut out. These principles retained their supremacy until late in the
eighteenth century when they were displaced by the romantic school,
which gave free expression to the individual and his strivings. Boileau’s
maxims imply a fairly static society, based on standard conceptions of
character and conduct, unsympathetic to the exotic and the bizarre, and
always acutely sensitive to the banal and the fatuous.
Hitherto those artists, dramatists and poets have been mentioned who
can be closely associated with Versailles, because they were directly
encouraged by the king. In one more sphere, that of music, it is possible
to establish this harmonious and fruitful association . 1 The historians of
1 For music, see voL vi, ch. m, 2.
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art and music make free use of the word ‘Baroque’ either as a general
description of the artistic product of this period, or as a technical term
implying divergence or even degeneration from some more restrained or
‘classical’ model. The word can be easily abused. Earlier in the century
the ballet was popular and was so closely associated with the court that it
was usually referred to as the ballet de cour. The Italian influence in
France, so strong in the time of Mazarin, helped to transform the ballet
de cour into opera, an evolution which was effected mainly by the
Florentine Giambattista Lully (1632-87), who entered the service of the
court in 1652; later he became Superintendent of the King’s Music and
acquired an almost complete monopoly in the provision of scores for
theatrical performances. From the exercise of this absolutism he made a
fortune. His autocracy was extended also to his orchestras, which were
subjected to a discipline not unlike that which Louis exercised over his
courtiers and subjects. Lully’s services to the opera were mainly in the
development of the overture and the march, both of them eminently
fitted for conveying that sense of majesty which permeated Versailles.
Such were the high priests who ministered to Louis in the innermost
recesses of the shrine. On the threshold were men and women of distinc-
tion who, though they did not join enthusiastically in the chorus of praise,
were associated with the court, and so were part of the social order. In
this category was Francois, due de La Rochefoucauld (1613-80), a
disillusioned survivor of the Fronde movement, whose Maximes were
first published in 1665. These well-known aphorisms, which reduce virtue
to a form of self-love, are characteristic of a society that had become
acutely conscious of itself, intent on examining and exposing those
principles which ensure success in a gregarious mode of life. They are of a
hard, brittle brilliance: the product, not of meditation in the study but
of sharp riposte in the salon. Their realism may owe something to
Montaigne; their bitterness may have come from the mortification of the
grand seigneur who had experienced the fiasco of the Fronde; their epi-
grammatic quality, so telling in conversation, loses some of its point as
it appears on the printed page. The amount of this loss may be estimated
by comparing them with the aphorisms of Oscar Wilde, which are so
effective because they are interspersed with conversation. But we owe it
to a woman that the Maximes are not even more bitter. Having parted
company with his wife, La Rochefoucauld took up his residence with
Madame de La Fayette, who also was unattached; in this new manage,
the duke somewhat moderated his cynicism, while the lady devoted her-
self to the writing of a historical novel, in which she showed that, even in
the religious wars of sixteenth-century France, love and its complications
were to be found (in high places). Of her gloomy partner she wrote:
‘Mons. de La Rochefoucauld m’a donne de l’esprit; mais j’ai reform^
son cceur.’ It was a good exchange.
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La Rochefoucauld may be conveniently classed with La Bruyfcre
(1645-96) in so far as both were keen critics of the society around them;
but, while the first was a duke, the second was a tutor in a noble family.
His experiences in that capacity, in the service of the great but arrogant
prince of Conde, induced him to ponder deeply the problems of life and
conduct. Beginning as a translator of the Greek character-writer
Theophrastus, he produced in his Caracteres ou les moeurs de ce siecle
(1688) a series of observations illustrative of the habit of self-examination
so popular at the time, not without a realisation of the sacrifice entailed
by this purely negative approach to life. When he wrote: ‘the pleasure of
criticism deprives us of the satisfaction of being strongly moved by very
beautiful things’, he was indicating one of the weaknesses of the French
classical school, in so far as criticism may induce constraint as well as
restraint. Still more, his words: ‘a man bom Christian and French finds
himself forced into satire; the great subjects are forbidden him’, show an
awareness of the barriers which limited imaginative achievement in the
reign of Louis XIV. La Bruyibre had great powers of penetration. He
summed up the requirements of good conversation as give and take: ‘He
who departs from a conversation with you pleased with himself and his
wit is completely pleased with you.’ Of women he naturally had a good
deal to say. He thought that there were more extremes among them ; they
are either much better or worse than men. Their lives are regulated not by
principles, but by the heart; and, when he wrote: ‘it costs less to hate than
to love’, he was summing up that psychology of the passions which had
such a fascination for his contemporaries.
Another, less conventional guide to the right conduct of life was Jean
de La Fontaine (1621-95), the son of a superintendent of woods and
forests. A keen student of the classics, he served for a time in his father’s
department; and, at his home in Chateau-Thierry (Champagne), he
acquired an intimate knowledge of nature and wild life. It happened that
the young and turbulent duchesse de Bouillon was in Chateau-Thierry,
and there she met the poet, whom she took back with her to the capital.
The result was that La Fontaine was introduced to polite society, par-
ticularly female society. Under the wing of the dowager duchess of
Orleans he frequented a fashionable set at the Luxembourg, where he
appears to have acted as a gentleman usher; and an introduction to
Fouquet the great financier secured for him a pension, which ended with
the disgrace of the minister in 1661. Meanwhile the poet had married and
had a son ; but he neglected his family as he did not wish to be encumbered
by troubles. He also sold the office of keeper of woods and forests, as
he wished to live in Paris. Completely amoral, but in an agreeable and
even gentlemanly way. La Fontaine was relieved both from domestic
worries and from the drab necessity of earning a living. Having become
enamoured of Madame de SabliSre, his ‘Iris’ and 'Turtle Dove’, he took
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up residence with her in 1672 (she had parted company with her husband),
an arrangement which was described thus by the lady: ‘I keep a dog, a
cat and La Fontaine.’ Madame de Sabliere, who specialised in science and
philosophy, provided a home for the poet during the next twenty years, a
home where he was able to share with the cat a solicitude for two things,
comfort and survival, and where he could practise an agreeable naturalism,
based on his instinct for the fundamentals of existence, taken from the
world of wild life which he knew so well. It was a highly specialised
equipment for a poet, particularly in this age of artificiality; and the
French Academy showed unusual discernment when, in 1694, it elected
him a member. In 1693 the death of Madame de Sabliere obliged him to
transfer to another and more pious household, where his last years were
years of edification. The best comment on all this was made by a servant
girl who ministered to him: ‘God would not be so cruel as to damn
him.’
The first edition of the Fables was published in 1668 in six books, and
was completed with the publication of the twelfth in 1694; in the later
books La Fontaine used his medium with somewhat greater freedom. In
choosing this medium of expression he may have been influenced by the
Socratic theory that morality can best be taught by the imagery of poetry
and allegory; indeed, in the introduction to the first six books he stated
that Socrates, in his last days, occupied himself in turning Aesop’s Fables
into verse. ‘We are the abridgement of all that is good and bad in the
animal kingdom’; in these simple stories of what is called the lower
creation we can see ourselves as in a glass. It is probably vain to seek for
any theory of their intention. Essentially a ‘clubbable’, social creature.
La Fontaine consorted with Moliere, Racine and Boileau, a quartet
which, at convivial gatherings in the Mouton Blanc, discussed each other’s
work : and, for breach of the conventions, imposed the penalty of reading
a verse or even a page of Chapelain’s output.
In 1682 occurred a little-known incident which brought him to the fore,
in the train, as usual, of a lady. That year is notable for the introduction
into France of a new drug — quinine — which, under the name of Jesuits’
Bark, was being used as a specific for fevers instead of the old purgings
and bleedings, an innovation which caused a violent controversy between
the Faculty and the amateur pharmacologists, who swore by the new
remedy. Among those who plunged into the fray was that termagant, the
duchesse de Bouillon, the first discoverer of La Fontaine, and now,
apparently, the discoverer of quinine. She asked him to write a poem on
the medical virtues of this substance. Always anxious to oblige, the old
protege of the duchess complied. In this way quinine is possibly the only
drug to have the distinction of public advertisement by a poet; and, for
its composition, the author appears to have dipped into the physiological
learning of his day. ‘My chief object is always to please’, he had already
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declared with truth in the preface to his Les Amours de Psychi (1669), a
collection of verse suitable for children; all that he wrote is suitable for
the child in each of us. While other poets soared aloft in purposeful flight,
he flitted about like ‘a butterfly on Parnassus’; while his contemporaries
were struggling with the subtle intricacies of human passion, he was con-
cerning himself with those elemental realities — comprehensible even by a
butterfly — which ultimately determine the conduct of the animal creation,
whether we call it higher or lower. In this way he became expert in the
simplest of all strategies: that which maintains a balance of population
between the two main divisions of living things — the hungry and the well-
fed, the astute and the over-confident, the quick and the dead.
But La Fontaine leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions.
Verse came so naturally to him that he often lapsed into it in his letters ;
in this medium he achieved an aptness and pithiness unattainable in prose,
an effect heightened by his resort to that rich vocabulary of sixteenth-
century France which was now becoming outmoded. As well as language,
and a sensitive ear for the sonority of line, La Fontaine had a sense of the
dramatic, so that each fable is usually a self-contained tragedy or comedy,
the story being told with inimitable concision and skill. As for the lessons
to be learned from the Fables, they are of the simplest — we can learn most
from the fox, the wolf and the rat; because, as everyman’s hand is against
them, they have had to develop a special technique directed against the
vanity or simplicity of their more placid and more highly esteemed
neighbours. ‘Quiconque est loup agisse en loup’; 1 it is not his fault that
he is hungry and must eat. In the jungle there is a continual contest of
wits, with death as the penalty; but the contest is often of a gentlemanly
character, for there is much give and take, and we can all help each other.
Death and suffering are inevitable, but we must submit with patience:
Le trepas vient tout gu6rir,
Mais ne bougeons d’ou nous sommes;
Plutot souffrir que mourir
C’est la devise des hommes. 2
It is because so many of us derive our first lessons in worldly wisdom from
them that the Fables, like Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe, have a
special place in our affections ; and it is evidence of the place assigned in
French civilisation to La Fontaine that the name alone saved the poet’s
great-granddaughter from the guillotine in the days of the Terror.
The ethics of the seventeenth century were based on a sharp distinction
between man and beast, the one having a soul, the other supposed to be
devoid even of intelligence and entitled to no protection, save as an article
1 ’Whoever is a wolf must act as a wolf.’
2 ‘Death comes to cure all; but let us not budge from where we are; better to suffer than
to die — such is the motto of humanity.’
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of human property. Descartes had propounded the stupid and cruel
theory that animals are incapable of feeling; his contemporaries and many
of his successors acted on this assumption. In consequence, the animal
community seemed to Christians a most unlikely source for a theory of
conduct, until La Fontaine showed how many and how close are the
analogies between the behaviour of the best of us and that of the creatures
which we profess to despise. If these analogies are valid, then we have
need to revise our vocabularies, since words like brutal, bestial and animal
are always used to denote human conduct so despicable that it can be
correlated only with the conduct attributed to another order of creation.
Even in the most highly polished society, the rule of tooth and claw, how-
ever skilfully disguised, may be the final arbiter; or, in the words of the
fabulist: ‘The less one puts oneself at the mercy of the fangs of others, the
better.’ By juxtaposing two worlds always kept apart. La Fontaine, who
probably had no satirical intention, may unwittingly have been com-
mitting a heresy so great that it escaped unnoticed, even by himself. But,
whatever meaning we may read into the Fables, everyone agrees that
these are so exquisitely told as to be things of joy in themselves. The
charm of the poetry is not in the rhymes, but in the cadence and simplicity
of the lines, so effortless that La Fontaine — a poets’ poet — must be con-
sidered the most spontaneous of all the writers in this age of artificiality
and convention.
La Fontaine probably had as little appreciation of nature as have the
wild creatures by which it is inhabited; moreover, it was not until a later
age that men sought in nature a reflection of their more serious moods.
But an exception may be made in favour of Madame de Sevigne, whose
prose style resembles La Fontaine’s in its richness of vocabulary, its
abundance of expressive words and its supple adaptability to mood ; it is
not surprising therefore that, like the Fables, the Lettres have been
acclaimed in every age and by every class. The high standard of letter-
writing in the later seventeenth century is accounted for by several
factors — by the comparative absence of journals and newspapers; by
difficulty of communication which made the letter specially welcome,
since its news was likely to be communicated to friends and neighbours;
and by the gradual improvement of the postal services, notably in the later
part of the century. The first edition of Madame de Sevigne’s Lettres was
published in 1697, the greater number of them having been addressed (in
the years 1671-91) to her daughter, Madame de Grignan, who was then
with her husband in distant Provence. The daughter, who appears to have
been somewhat haughty and reserved, did not completely respond to her
mother’s affection. This affection inspired letters which have a unique
place in historical literature. As in a panorama they enable us to follow at
least the externals of Louis’s reign — the trial of Fouquet in 1664; famous
public executions, such as those of the two poisoners, the Marquise de
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Brinvilliers and Madame Voisin (she shivered slightly at the execution of
the latter) ; the social activities which graced a meeting of the Estates of
Brittany in 167 1 ; the trepidation produced in the following year by reports
of French casualties in the passage of the Rhine (her son was in the
fighting); the death in battle of the great Turenne (1675) — reading his
exploits seemed to Madame de Sevigne like reading the history of Rome;
her visit to the ‘vallon affreux’ — Port-Royal des Champs — where she
listened to the edifying conversation of the nuns and thought of her own
salvation. These are only a few of the more notable incidents which make
an indelible impression on the mind of the reader.
Her letters show that Madame de Sevigne regarded the peasants whom
she saw in the fields as barely human ; but in this respect she was in agree-
ment with the social class to which she belonged. Nevertheless, there was
at least one interesting respect in which she was not of her age. She loved
the seclusion of her chateau at Les Rochers in Brittany, where she took
solitary walks in the moonlight, recalling sad thoughts which she was
unwilling to reveal, even to her daughter. She loved the trees and was in
the habit of inscribing sentimental messages on their trunks; she was a
keen listener to the birds, and became thoughtful in the moonlight. All
this shows an anticipation of the romanticism of the eighteenth century.
But strongest of all was the love which she bestowed on an unresponsive
daughter — ‘ma fille, aimez moi done toujours; e’est mon ame’. Madame
de Sevigne was the greatest mother in literature.
A certain vein of femininity can be detected in the writings of Francois
de Salignac de La Mothe-Fenelon (1651-1715), archbishop of Cambrai, a
vein which may have been developed by his experience as director of a
school for girls of good family who had recently been ‘converted’ to
Catholicism. The lessons which he derived from this occupation were
embodied in his first book: Trait 6 de V Education des Filles (1687). Almost
alone in his age he realised the importance of women in the State, and the
need for providing them with a good education; but, like his English con-
temporary George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, he believed that the female
sex is essentially subordinate, and that a woman can achieve happiness
and usefulness only within the limits imposed by nature. It was this
emphasis on nature that gave originality to his theories, for he claimed
that the natural bent of the pupil should be followed as much as possible,
and that education was not a process of filling the mind with information,
but of drawing out and directing what was already there. In this way
Fenelon’s treatise anticipated Fmile; the archbishop was also a precursor
of Rousseau in what has been called ‘poetic prose’, a phrase relating to
content rather than to form. Idealist and optimist, Fenelon believed in
the natural goodness of man, most clearly evidenced in the supposed ‘ age
of innocence’, and most obviously contrasted with the corruption which
underlies despotic government. In one more respect the archbishop was
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an apostle of nature. He anticipated the Physiocrats in his view that the
soil is the source of all wealth; and he regarded as parasites all who
batten on that wealth.
In 1689 Fenelon became the tutor to the duke of Burgundy, eldest
grandson of Louis, as Bossuet had been tutor to the duke’s father, the
Dauphin. The parallel can be extended. Bossuet wrote the histoire
universe lie; Fenelon, in his turn, wrote Tilemaque, which appeared in
1 699. These two books, written by great ecclesiastics, for pupils who, it was
hoped, would one day rule France, show diametrically opposite points of
view; for, while the earlier volume claims to reveal the will of God in the
evolution of absolute kingship, the later work shows how that will can be
better interpreted by the exercise of humanity and intelligence in the ruler.
Based on the Odyssey , Telemaque includes two Utopias: one. La Betique,
where happiness is secured by eliminating private property, and the other.
La Salente, where the same result is achieved by confining power to an
aristocracy by birth (as contrasted with one of money). Both types of
State are based on agriculture; luxury and excessive wealth are prohibited;
virtue is promoted by rulers who avoid display and seek their glories in
activities other than war. The reference to Louis XIV is obvious. Fenelon’s
ideal State was not unlike a monastery dedicated to the cult of Socrates.
Frugality verging on asceticism was the rule; as in Plato’s Republic,
music, drama and poetry were to be regulated in order to promote only
the noblest impulses. The ruler must constantly interfere with the subject
in order to promote virtue; man was forced to be good. A later age
(arguing also from nature) wanted to force him to be free. It is not a far
step from Telemaque to the Contrat Social and the French Revolution.
The first effective blows at the ancien regime were directed not by atheists
or radicals, but by the pious Pascal and the virtuous Fenelon.
Fenelon is thus representative of the transition in Louis’s reign from
the period of great imaginative achievement to that of criticism of the
existing regime, when the attention of thoughtful Frenchmen was directed
to the two evils following the royal despotism : misery at home and hatred
abroad. It is possible that great literature cannot flourish in such an
atmosphere, at least not in the France of that time, because so much of
the creative life of the nation was centred in Paris and Versailles. This con-
centration may be contrasted with the more healthy diffusion of the
eighteenth century, as exemplified by Voltaire who, though a Parisian, had
his headquarters at Femey, near the Swiss frontier; or Montesquieu who
was so closely connected with Bordeaux; or Rousseau who lived an
almost vagabond existence and detested society. In contrast, the Sun-
King shed dazzling rays illuminating only a small circle; and when that
light weakened, there remained only shadow and darkness. It may have
been mere chance that brought together such a galaxy of talent as
illuminated the first thirty years of the reign; or the phenomenon may be
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explained by the direct encouragement and direction given by king and
court ; or there may have been some incentive arising from the conviction
that the nation was in the ascendant and on the threshold of a larger life.
In English literature one can trace some such elements in the Elizabethan
and in the Victorian ages. In France, they are not easily discernible after
about 1700.
How can we characterise the wonderful achievements of the earlier
years of the reign? These achievements were so richly diversified that we
must be wary of accepting any single definition, if indeed definition is
possible. But we can be sure of one thing, namely the influence of women.
In France this influence was usually both stimulating and beneficent, in
contrast with its counterpart in England, where so many of the women at
the court of Charles II were merely mercenary and where, as a rule,
women did not become associated with men of letters until a later date.
France is one of those countries where the female is often more active and
intelligent than the male; where sex and good food are matters, not of
taboo, but of discriminating connoisseurship ; where a partnership, not
necessarily hallowed by the marriage vows, may nevertheless be based on
some intellectual or spiritual exchange which commands respect rather
than opprobrium. In England, where such partnerships exist they have
to be kept discreetly veiled. It is significant of the part played by women
in the history of France that, of her two great saints, one was a servant
maid; and (if Moliere be excepted) it may be hazarded that, but for
the shrewdness, the insight and the charm of their feminine associates,
the men of letters of the reign of Louis XIV would not have achieved
so much.
In conclusion, it may be asked whether French influence can be
detected in other European countries within the period covered by this
chapter. Any attempt to answer this question must begin with acceptance
of the fact that this period, and indeed the whole of the reign of Louis, was
an era of French dominance which was based on threats and force. Against
this dominance there was angry protest and reaction; and in every country
menaced by Versailles innumerable pamphleteers and satirists engaged in
scathing condemnation, not only of the Sun-King and his agents, but of
the civilisation over which he presided. This antagonism was specially
strong in Germany and Holland, which had special reason to detest the
arrogance of their powerful neighbour; and so, in these countries, French
character and culture were derided as corrupt and degenerate, in contrast
with Teutonic ‘honesty’ and ‘virility’. Throughout Europe, the exiled
Huguenots added fuel to the flames by their contributions to a vast
literature denouncing Louis and his subjects as modern Huns.
An exception, or an apparent exception, is provided by the England of
the Restoration. This can be connected with the personal example and
popularity of Charles II whose tastes were more French than English.
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His preference for a bon mot to clinch an argument, his unfailing choice
of the agreeable rather than the arduous, and his complete absence of
shyness with the other sex — all these are Gallic rather than Saxon
qualities. But the royal influence, so far as it was exercised in music and
drama, was not always felicitous, nor was it even long-lived. He restored
music to the churches from which the Puritans had driven it; but the
music consisted of the somewhat shallow, voluptuous melodies which
Lully had popularised and proved to be little more than a diversion from
the main stream of a great tradition which was resumed, with such bril-
liant results, by Purcell and Blow. The same is true of Restoration drama,
which collapsed, not from its obscenity, but from its inanity. In architec-
ture, the palace of Versailles provided a model for England and many
continental countries; in the decorative arts the achievements of Les
Gobelins helped to ensure [the high standards of furniture-making in the
eighteenth century. The resources of horticulture were enriched by the
cultivation of the pear and the nectarine; and it can be claimed that the
amenities of life were enhanced by the introduction from France of what,
at first, were regarded as insidious luxuries. It became fashionable to study
French, even at a time when the two countries were enemies. Shortly after
the Treaty of Ryswick (1O97) advertisements appeared in London news-
papers advertising establishments where French was taught ‘as it is
spoken at Versailles’.
It is not in these spheres of fashionable example or direct emulation,
however, that one must seek for the abiding influence of French imagina-
tive achievement. It was in the field of literary criticism, in the general
conception of the functions of the poetic art, that France exercised a
dominating influence in England. Two interesting personalities helped to
facilitate this process. One was Charles de Saint-Lvremond (1610-1703),
a French exile in England who, in his capacity of informal literary
ambassador, helped to make the dialogue more popular as a literary form
and to give a personal illustration of the importance of conversation for
the man of letters. He was credited with the aphorism that the ideal is the
Frenchman who can think and the Englishman who can talk. Himself a
voluminous rather than a distinguished writer, Saint-Lvremond provided
for Dryden and his contemporaries an example of that urbanity and
fastidiousness so strikingly contrasted with the spontaneity and freshness
of the native muse. Two ideals were brought into contrast, and some kind
of compromise was effected.
‘What, I beseech you, is more easy than to write a regular French play
or more difficult than to write an irregular English one, like those of
Fletcher or of Shakespeare?’ 1 These are the words of Dryden who,
nevertheless, proved to be the main channel through which French influ-
1 Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P.Ker (Oxford, 1900).
1, 77-
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ence passed into English literature. Well aware of the great literary
achievements of his own country and of the banality of many foreign
models, he selected and applied those excellencies of French theory and
practice which he regarded as correctives of English insularity. A keen
student of Corneille, he experimented with the use of rhyme in heroic
drama, using it effectively in dialogue, and so preparing the way for the
great vogue and high standard of the couplet in the Augustan Age. His
progress can be shown by comparing his Annus Mirabilis, published in
1667, with Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Hind and the Panther
(1687). The early poem reveals the genuine but less tutored inspiration of
an older age, while the later compositions are distinguished by greater
coherence, better structure and more incisiveness. It may well have been
this French influence that prompted him to aim at ‘an election of apt
words and a right disposing of them ’ j 1 to study form and expression as
vehicles in which thought and inspiration must be confined.
It was Boileau, not Corneille, whom Dryden acclimatised in England.
In 1680-1 he assisted Sir W. Soame in his translation of the Art Poetique,
and this almost official acceptance of Boileau as the modern arbiter of
taste, comparable with Aristotle and Longinus in antiquity, was signalised
by the Earl of Mulgrave’s Essay upon Poetry (1682) and the Earl of
Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684). Under such skilled
direction and such noble patronage the influence of French literary
ideals was assured. ‘Wit’, declared Dryden, ‘is best conveyed to us in the
most easy language; and is most to be admired when a great thought
comes dressed in words so commonly received that it is understood by
the meanest apprehensions.’ 2 This insistence on clarity and ease of com-
prehension is characteristic of French taste; and it was in this respect that
the influence of France was most potent in England. It should be recalled
also that the greatest intellectual impact on European intelligence was still
that of Descartes; this was part of the scientific revolution which trans-
formed the thought of the seventeenth century and penetrated to every
nation where there were men sufficiently educated or intelligent to receive
it. The Cartesian influence harmonised well with the principles advocated
by Boileau and practised by Dryden, since all three illustrated the virtues
of lucidity, order and precision, even if their achievement was at the
expense of the original or the imaginative. These qualities were abun-
dantly illustrated in the literature of eighteenth-century Europe.
Nevertheless, there remained something distinctive and inimitable in
the intellectual product of France during the first three decades of the
personal government of Louis XIV. Its mediocre products could be
copied: its achievements of imaginative genius are unique. There were
many fabulists, but only one La Fontaine; many letter writers, but only
one Madame de Sevigne; many moralists and preachers, but only one
1 Ibid. 1 , 95 . * Ibid. 1 , 52 .
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Bossuet. Racine had neither predecessors nor successors; Molifcre must
be classified, not with his contemporaries or imitators, but with Shake-
speare. These writers, though showing unmistakable traces of the age in
which they lived, are to be included in the heritage of western civilisation.
Herein, it may be claimed, lies the enduring achievement of the reign, so
sharply contrasted with the impermanence of the military and political
dominance exercised by Louis XIV.
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CHAPTER XII
THE DUTCH REPUBLIC
T he second half of the seventeenth century, which in many European
countries witnessed rapid developments in the social, economic and
political fields, was in the Dutch Republic a period of consolidation
rather than change. The institutional, economic and social framework
virtually remained what it had been in the early seventeenth century. The
great statesmen who dominated the scene, John de Witt and William III,
did not reorganise the political system, and even the issues which divided
the Dutch political parties (the republican party and the party of the
Orangists) differed only slightly from those which had separated Olden-
barnevelt and Maurice of Orange in 1618, Amsterdam and William II in
1650. 1 There were, no doubt, vehement political conflicts in the second
half of the century, but on the whole these were conflicts between rival
cliques and personalities within the governing class rather than between
social groups and important political principles. It is not difficult to
explain this situation. By 1650 the Dutch Republic had reached a point
in its economic expansion beyond which it could not easily develop, but it
had been unable to eliminate the uncertainties and tensions in its political
system which had already caused dangerous clashes.
The complexity of Dutch life makes it very difficult to describe the
social structure of the country. The differences between the various
provinces were so fundamental that no broad generalisations can do
justice to the facts. The interests, the power, even the language of the
cattle-breeding gentlemen-farmers of Friesland, or of the nobility of
Guelderland with its important feudal privileges, are hardly comparable
with those of the urban patricians of Holland. The tenant-farmers of
Guelderland and Overijssel, living in sparsely populated areas and working
in the first place to supply their personal needs, had problems different
from those of Holland — one of the most densely populated areas of
Europe — who specialised in the cultivation of commercial crops for
industry and in horticulture but did not grow com. Holland, however,
was by far the most influential of the seven provinces, and thus it may be
justifiable to deal with the leading classes of Holland only. Its social
hierarchy was, in fact, simple. The nobility was numerically weak and
formed a strictly closed caste. It did not possess much political or eco-
nomic power; most of the land was in the possession of urban capitalists.
The nobility had no links with the great burgher families and did not
challenge their leadership.
1 For these conflicts, see vol. rv, ch. xn.
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By the middle of the seventeenth century the Dutch bourgeoisie had
acquired its typical form. The families which had grown wealthy through
commerce and become influential in government during the early seven-
teenth century constituted the oligarchy which in fact ruled the province.
They provided the men who served in the urban administrations, the
States, the boards of the big trading-companies, and with these functions
went the exclusive right of making appointments to numerous minor
offices in the towns and the country. It is difficult to assess the total num-
ber of persons falling under the category of ‘regents’; a rash estimate
which cannot have the pretension of any precision, might suggest that in
Holland one man in every 1000 belonged to a regent family. Little is
known about their wealth, and it is obvious that the regents of a small
town like Hoorn may have shared the prejudices and the social privileges
of the Amsterdam millionaires but could, of course, not compare with
them in power and influence on the level of provincial or national
politics. By the middle of the century most of the regents had withdrawn
from business and invested their money in life-annuities issued by the
municipal, provincial and general governments, in country estates or in
shares of the East India Company. They had consolidated themselves as
a social group and as far as possible prevented other families from entering
their ranks. Though they sometimes acquired titles of nobility and built
beautiful country houses, they remained fundamentally urban patricians
and had only slight interests in certain forms of intensive agriculture.
It is remarkable that the closing of the oligarchy led during these years
in Zeeland and other provinces to a conception of public offices as
private, more or less negotiable, property. Whereas in France it was the
venality of the offices that brought into existence the nobility of the robe,
in the Dutch Republic it was the growth of an oligarchic patriciate which
led to practices which expressed exactly the same ideas. The ruling
families began to divide public functions in the towns and the country
according to certain rules previously agreed upon, in order to attenuate
the bitter daily struggle for power and profit. This development had, how-
ever, not yet been concluded; it was rather slow in penetrating into the
province of Holland and had not yet reached Amsterdam. During many
years the chief burgomaster, Comelis de Graeff van Zuidpolsbroek, a
very subtle politician, defended John de Witt’s regime against a group of
rivals; but after his death in 1664 conflicts of the utmost vehemence broke
out and the town wavered in its allegiance. Deep discords within the
isolated, all-powerful minority of the regents paralysed the provincial
government.
The political structure of the Dutch Republic was cumbersome and
complicated : it did in fact not constitute one republic but a federation of
, seven sovereign provinces, each with its special characteristics. The
federal government was weak. The most important of the federal institu-
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tions was the States General to which each of the provinces sent a delega-
tion bound to vote as instructed by its principals. Unanimity was
required for the States General to take a decision committing all their
members. Yet the States General, meeting daily at The Hague for some
hours, had important tasks to perform. They acted as the representative
of the Union, conducted foreign affairs, controlled defence and federal
taxation which was apportioned among the provinces according to a
fixed key, Holland paying about 58 per cent. They nominated, finally, the
captain-general and the admiral-general of the Union, offices usually held
by the Prince of Orange. However, the States General were clearly not a
sovereign body. Sovereignty resided in the States of the various provinces,
the composition of which varied greatly. The States of Holland consisted
of nineteen delegations each having one vote: the nobility and eighteen
towns. In the States just as in the States General important decisions were
normally taken unanimously: the principle of Dutch government was that
none of its members could be coerced to comply with the majority. In
practice a decision was reached only after long negotiations and thanks to
the persuasiveness of the leading statesmen.
The centrifugal forces in the government were sometimes checked by
two important officials: the Grand Pensionary and the stadholder. The
Grand Pensionary was the legal adviser of the States of Holland who
acted as the president of the States and of their committees, led the
provincial deputation to the States General, often carried on the corre-
spondence of the Republic with the Dutch ambassadors abroad and
received their dispatches. An energetic and intelligent man who enjoyed
the confidence of the urban administrations in Holland was able to wield
decisive power not only in his own province but in the whole Republic.
The function of stadholder was more ambiguous. The incumbent of the
stadholdership of Holland was always the Prince of Orange. He was
appointed by the sovereign States and was therefore in theory a provincial
official just as the Grand Pensionary. But since he was always stadholder
of more than one province at the same time (Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht,
Overijssel and Guelderland normally nominated the Prince of Orange,
Groningen and Drente, not represented in the States General, often did
so, whereas Friesland always appointed a member of the Nassau branch
of the family) and acted also as captain-general and admiral-general of
the Union, he quite naturally participated in the making of federal policy.
The enormous prestige, moreover, of his noble birth and the popularity
of his great House gave him an influence and power not defined by any
constitutional laws but none the less real and important.
Throughout the first half of the century there had been tensions
between the States of Holland and the stadholder. During the 1640’s the
ruling oligarchy of Holland had opposed the militarist and dynastic
policies of Frederick Henry, captain-general and admiral-general, stad-
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holder of all the provinces but Friesland, because they were designed to
continue the war with Spain and to enhance the position of the Orange
family through the marriage of Frederick Henry’s son, William II, to
the daughter of Charles I, Mary. Fear and anger had been aroused by
Frederick Henry’s wish to support the royalist cause in the Civil War. But
Frederick Henry died in 1647; in 1648 the regents had their way in making
peace with Spain at Munster. His son William II, however, a young and
adventurous man, appointed to all his father’s dignities, felt frustrated by
this victory of the States and soon considered himself strong enough to
challenge Holland and Amsterdam. The conflict seemed grave and
dangerous. But suddenly, on 6 November 1650, he died. The Dutch
statesmen found themselves in a completely new situation. William II’s
only child, William III, was bom on 14 November; the calm of his
nursery was disturbed by the vehement conflicts between his mother,
Mary Stuart, and his grandmother Amelia, the widow of Frederick Henry.
In most provinces the idea of appointing Friesland’s stadholder to the
functions of William II did not even arise; only Groningen and the terri-
tory of Drente decided to fill the vacancy in this way. Thus for the first
time in the history of the Republic five of the seven provinces represented
in the States General were truly republican, although in some princely
palaces at The Hague a group of Calvinist predikants and anglophile
nobles and adventurers kept plotting on behalf of the greatness of the
Orange dynasty.
The twenty-two years of almost completely republican rule, which fol-
lowed, form a very distinctive period in Dutch history. In 1651 the States
of Holland tried to lay the foundation of a new form of government by
summoning to The Hague the so-called Grand Assembly and by pro-
posing to attribute to this body, which was intended to be a joint session
of all the provincial States and as such the sum total of sovereignty in the
federated provinces, the right to decide arbitrarily on the cardinal prob-
lems awaiting solution. In the view of Holland the States General, still
largely dominated by the proteges of William II, was not the proper place
for so difficult a task. But the plan failed. The deputies sent by the
provinces to the Grand Assembly had no larger powers than those sent to
the States General, and what was intended to be a congress of sovereigns
was in reality only a congress of ambassadors. Consequently the Grand
Assembly (January- August 1651) was unable to produce any constructive
plan and resigned itself to much classicist and confused oratory. The
only decision of importance concerned the army. More than ever before
military affairs were now to be dealt with as if they depended on the
sovereign will of each of the seven provinces — with the result that the
army was in great danger of being split into seven provincial armies. This
was a victory for extreme particularism. Thus the real importance of the
Grand Assembly was that it brought to a culmination and confirmed
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officially a tendency that undoubtedly was one of the main features of the
confederation. The United Provinces — as John de Witt said 1 — were not a
respublica in the singular but respublicae in the plural.
John de Witt, who soon became the leader of the republican party
(owing to his office of Grand Pensionary to which he was appointed in
1653), exerted himself not only to defend the new stadholderless form of
government but also to justify it intellectually. It was called by his
adherents the System of True Liberty and de Witt availed himself of the
services of excellent publicists like the brothers De la Court and of so
systematic a philosopher as Spinoza. This literary activity gives the period
the character of an intellectual adventure, of an attempt made by young
men — de Witt himself was 27 years old in 1653 — to break with a past
marred by awkward compromises. Yet this rationalistic and doctrinaire
aspect of the regime was but one of the elements in a very complex reality.
John de Witt and his collaborators moulded into concrete form a variety
of old and respectable tendencies. The dynastic policies of Frederick
Henry and William II had aroused anger among the ruling classes,
particularly those of Holland, because they led to adventures of incal-
culable consequences. The men upon whom, after the death of William II,
power naturally devolved could devote themselves to the task of streng-
thening their own power. In principle they had always been in possession
of sovereignty, but they had never fully exercised it. They immediately
barred all the ways through which the authority of the stadholder had
penetrated into the towns and the urban administrations. The various
States decided that the annual elections of urban magistrates would in
future be the affair of the towns only and in fact always be made by
co-optation. All outside influence, especially that of the stadholder, who
had in certain circumstances the right of selection from a number of recom-
mended candidates, was eliminated and the power of a small group of
ruling families was confirmed. This small group of ruling families formed
the strongest support of de Witt’s party. Not all of them were ‘ Wittians’,
but the most important among them, especially in Holland and Amster-
dam, considered a regime which gave them practically a monopoly of
power the best regime for the time being.
The regime was, however, not merely the dictatorship of a narrow class.
It was deeply rooted in the life of the whole population, not because the
ruling groups shared their power with the masses of the people, but
because they turned away from them and left them alone. Thus the
republican regime was silently supported by the numerous religious dis-
senters, who needed protection against the intolerance of the Calvinist
minority. It was supported by Roman Catholics and Protestant sects, by
intellectuals and wide strata of the bourgeoisie. It did not disturb the
1 Brieven van Johan de Witt , ed. R. Fruin and G. W. Kemkamp (Amsterdam, 19068!.),
1, 62.
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turbulent, restless growth of numerous and very active small groups of
religious innovators and considered it its sole task ingeniously to maintain
the balance between extremes and to prevent excesses. The principle of
toleration was utilitarian rather than founded on any philosophical
principle. The regents never tired of repeating that foreign trade would
inevitably be destroyed by the establishment of an exclusive Calvinist
supremacy.
By the middle of the seventeenth century probably nearly half of the
Dutch population (Brabant included) were still loyal to the Catholic faith.
In the towns of the provinces of Holland and Utrecht numerous mission-
aries were allowed to carry on their partly secret activities. The majority of
the rural population in these provinces was certainly Catholic: it is not
surprising that Dutch civilisation continued to be permeated by Romish
elements. This does not alter the fact that the situation of the Catholics
continued to be precarious. The Dutch Republic was officially a Protestant
State and the Catholics, though allowed to have their own religious
services if they were willing to pay for the inattention of the authorities,
found it increasingly difficult to keep their posts in the urban administra-
tions. However, Calvinism was not the only alternative to Roman
Catholicism. Of a total population of perhaps about two millions prob-
ably one-third belonged to orthodox Calvinism, a creed that consequently
remained what it had been during the Revolt, though of course to a much
lesser degree: the creed of a minority. Beside it innumerable small sects
ventured to express extremely liberal interpretations of Christian dogma
or even a de-Christianised religion to the point of transforming it into a
general moral philosophy.
The dissenters no doubt supported the government of the tolerant
regents, without being able to save it when it was fighting for its life. This
would have required a solid organisation, but this they lacked. Yet the
deep divisions of the Dutch people may help to explain a fact which must
be regarded as one of the salient features of Dutch history in the seven-
teenth century: the fact that numerous changes of government took place
without the violence accompanying the contemporary upheavals in
France and England. It is indeed remarkable that the events of 1618-19,
of 1650 and of 1672, all fundamental conflicts, did not develop into revolu-
tions. The suppleness of the Dutch form of government and the general
prosperity partly explain this ; but the complex religious divisions, which
made clear-cut conflicts almost impossible and in which party divisions
disappeared like water in sand, certainly contributed a great deal to the
fundamental weakness of all forms of government and to the ease with
which one form was substituted for another.
It is difficult to understand the nature of the opposition to the domina-
tion of the regents, but some of its elements at least are clear. No imagina-
tion is needed to see that de Witt’s way of eliminating the influence of the
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Orange family in Holland, and as far as possible also in the other provinces,
excluded a compromise with the clientele of the great House. It is also
clear that the Orangists wanted to continue the policies by which Frederick
Henry and William II had aroused so much antagonism. A small number
of Calvinist pastors continued to nurse their ideal of an anti-Spanish
crusade. These men were, of course, opposed to the religious tolerance of
the regents, to their Erastian principles and to their complete lack of
religious dynamism. Possibly the sharp social difference between the
predikants of the lower middle class and the ruling families helps to
explain the conflicts. Much more important, however, was the instinctive
reaction of large groups of the population to the regime of the States in
times of emergency. This reaction was often fostered by political speeches
and pamphlets, but more often it arose spontaneously out of economic
distress and political distrust. Sharp rises in the price of rye were
caused by the Anglo-Dutch wars and, coupled with unemployment
and deep suspicion, they led to vehement disturbances in the towns
and a fairly general outcry against a regime suspected of treachery and
inefficiency.
Yet these popular movements did not grow steadily during the years
until — after the first disappointments of 1653 — they became sufficiently
strong in 1672 to overthrow the regime. On the contrary, their vehemence
diminished. A more decisive factor contributing to the fatal weakness of
the System of True Liberty in 1672 was the danger of being hollowed out
from the inside. Orangist regents had retained much of their influence in
some towns and provinces and their position became stronger as Prince
William grew older. The sharp conflicts, moreover, within the town
governments, conflicts often springing from the struggle for power,
selfishness and personal hatred, naturally tended to expand and to merge
with extra-mural conflicts. It was easy for a regent ousted by one of
de Witt’s friends to call himself an Orangist and so to infuse fresh vigour
into the national party strife. Modem historians have carefully studied
this phenomenon in Amsterdam and there is no reason to suppose that it
did not occur in other towns also.
Thus an explanation of the political struggles in the terms of social
contrasts is insufficient, although undoubtedly they formed one of the
numerous elements from which the great conflict sprang. Neither is it
possible to link the political development with the economic situation.
It is perhaps surprising that the Orangist period before 1651 witnessed a
considerable expansion of the Dutch economy, and that it came to a halt
under the republican regime which was so eager to defend commercial
interests. It was only about 1680 that the economy began to recover, a
process which continued until the death of William III. This temporary
slowing down of what had been such an amazingly dynamic development
was not due to any fundamental change in the structure of Dutch com-
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merce in general or of the Amsterdam staple market in particular. 1 It was
caused by transient changes which after the middle of the century had a
stagnating effect. Especially the Baltic com trade, the ‘mother com-
merce’ of the Republic, suffered a serious decline in the years between
1652 and 1680, a decline not so much to be explained by increasing
competition as by some bad harvests in the area of the Vistula, by the wars,
by a fall in the demand for com in western and southern Europe, and
above all by the general depression afflicting the European economy
during the i66o’s and 1670’s. It would be a gross exaggeration to speak of
a crisis of the Dutch economy. The stagnation in the expansion of some
important branches of commerce was accompanied by a sharp rise in that
of others. Commercial relations with Spain became very close after 1648
and led to the development of Amsterdam as a leading bullion market.
The Dutch economic hegemony in Muscovy was confirmed. Industry did
not seem to suffer. It was precisely during these years that Leiden, the
biggest European manufacturing town after Lyon, made its greatest
advance in the cloth industry, and the industry of the area of the river
Zaan in North Holland increased rapidly. Yet this does not alter the fact
that the general expansion of the early seventeenth century was discon-
tinued after 1650 and that de Witt’s period witnessed economic difficulties
and in some fields even a mild form of recession.
Thus in all spheres of Dutch life a similar phenomenon can be observed.
The top seemed to have been reached ; nothing remained but to attempt
to retain the things acquired. De Witt’s system, however fashionable it
may have been intellectually, was in practice conservative. In a supremely
intelligent way his conduct of domestic as well as foreign affairs tried to
freeze the situation. In fact his whole policy was a reaction to disturbing
tendencies and as such, the saturation of the Republic taken into account,
a defence of fundamental Dutch interests.
The two disturbing elements which threatened the system and finally
wrecked it were political. They were the closely related questions of
England and Orange. Neither of them could de Witt eliminate and his
ability to neutralise them was limited. England was a dangerous, but not
necessarily a deadly enemy during the years in which the Dutch Republic,
thanks to the uncertainties of the European political scene, was able to
play the part of an arbiter. When it became clear that France was out to
take over the Spanish heritage — European hegemony — English foreign
policy became a very great danger because it contributed to a shift in the
balance of power. The Orange question also assumed frightening propor-
tions, and by the time Prince William came of age it dominated the
situation. De Witt’s greatness, the greatness of the Dutch Republic, lies
1 For details of the character of the Dutch economy and the political institutions of the
Republic, see vol. iv, ch. xn.
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enclosed between Spanish and French hegemony, between the adult
vigour of William II and that of William III. It fundamentally was a
greatness ad interim.
The Dutch had not foreseen the forms English hostility would take. It
was mainly economic hostility. The English, obsessed by the idea of a sum
total of world trade, thought that the portion they desired must necessarily
come out of the share of others, in practice that of the Dutch. Thus
English hostility was aggressive, the Dutch reaction defensive. Much of
this rivalry was strikingly mean: short-sighted irritations about daily
competition, petulant touchiness, the desire to take Dutch ships and to
sell them as prizes. But there were also contrasting principles : the idea of
the domination of the British seas against the system, or the lack of
system, which the Dutch called the principle of the free seas and which
they upheld wherever their commercial power was or could be expected
to be supreme. Only after many years and after the opening of new possi-
bilities did it begin to be realised that world commerce itself could be
expanded and that two capitalist and competing states could thrive
without destroying each other.
The three Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century did not con-
tribute to the solution of the economic problems. They sprang from a
narrow interpretation of world affairs and did not bring much profit to
either party. It was only possible for these economic hostilities to run riot
and to force themselves to the front because in the short period of relative
European calm between the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the
Spanish hegemony, and the War of Devolution of 1667, which inaugurated
the French hegemony, no wider political interests silenced these passionate
jealousies or, at any rate, prevented them from developing into war.
When in 1672 Charles II started the third war against Holland, it was felt
that a policy which for twenty years seemed a reasonable programme of
economic expansion was becoming a dangerous adventure.
Nobody had been able to foresee this either in England or in the Dutch
Republic. The Dutch had followed the development of the Puritan
Revolution with great anxiety and indignation. Few were those who did
not regard regicide as a serious offence against religion, morals and public
law. But the regents took grave risks to prevent William II from involving
the Republic in the struggle. There is no doubt that the English revolu-
tionaries felt greatly relieved when the stadholder suddenly died and the
Dutch State seemed to become a pure republic. Cromwell made a
vigorous attempt to raise Anglo-Dutch relations high above economic
rivalry. In March 1651 he sent a mission to The Hague with far-reaching
proposals: a close alliance between the two Protestant republics, a union
even. It was a plan without a future. For the Dutch the realisation of the
plan would have meant considerable economic loss because they had so
much more to bring into the union, and it is easy to understand that the
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scheme was discarded. Yet the regents made a serious mistake in thinking
that their haughty dismissal of Cromwell’s attempt at finding a political
solution to the problem of Anglo-Dutch relations, against the will of the
London merchants, would be without grave consequences. The openly
hostile attitude of the population of The Hague, stirred up by the court
and its clique of predikants, intensified the feelings of frustration and
bitter anger of the English envoys, who returned to London without any
acceptable alternative to Cromwell’s plan. Again the economic rivalry was
given free scope. In October 1651 the Navigation Act was passed, in fact
a declaration of economic war upon the Dutch. A Dutch embassy sent to
England in December asked for its withdrawal, but failed to offer any-
thing in exchange. The first Anglo-Dutch War followed (1652-4).
The war is of less interest for the history of Anglo-Dutch relations than
for the internal development of the Republic. Neither party achieved a
clear supremacy and after two years the struggle ended in a draw.
Cromwell, moreover, in 1654 had more arguments at his disposal than in
1652 for bringing to an end this uninhibited outburst of economic
jealousies. In 1652 there was some reason to suspect that the con-
temptuous rejection of his proposals sprang from stubborn pro-Stuart
Orangism. In 1654 these anxieties no longer made sense. The republican
regime in Holland had stood the test.
It had not been an easy victory. During the summer of 1652 it seemed
likely that the popular movements would force the authorities to appoint
William III to the dignities of his ancestors. There was, of course, no
sound and considered Orangist solution to the problems of foreign and
domestic policy. It was not political convictions which sought to express
themselves in the innumerable, sometimes dangerous disturbances taking
place in 1652 in the eastern provinces and in 1653 in almost all the towns
of Holland and Zeeland, but suspicion of the government and despair, a
result of the misery caused by the war. During 1651, but more still in
1652, the prices at the Amsterdam corn-exchange rose steeply, and the
paralysis of trade and fishing brought serious unemployment. In the
midst of this dangerous political crisis, which soon persuaded some
Zeeland regents of the necessity of changing course and of making more
room for the Prince of Orange, John de Witt was appointed to the office
of Grand Pensionary of Holland. He knew how unpopular the repub-
lican regime was, supported in his estimate by less than one-tenth of
one per cent of the ‘common populace’. 1 But he also realized that the
‘ idle sound of the name of a child ’ 2 could only become dangerous if among
the regents a party arose able to give political form to popular discontent.
De Witt managed to overcome this danger by his adroit and courageous
words.
1 Brieven van Johan de Witt , ed. R. Fruin and G. W. Kemkamp (Amsterdam, 1906 ff.),
1,96. 2 Ibid. p. 161
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To the relief of both de Witt and Cromwell the Orangist movement
came to nothing. Moreover, de Witt proved willing, though with extreme
reluctance, to have the States of Holland vote at Cromwell’s request never
to appoint a Prince of Orange stadholder or captain-general (Act of
Seclusion, 1654). Although Cromwell was satisfied with this solemn assur-
ance, it was nevertheless a very poor remnant of his ideal to bring both
countries together in one united Protestant republic, a republic which
obviously would exclude both Stuart and Orange. Thanks to this com-
promise the Peace of Westminster could be signed (1654), a peace which
solved none of the economic problems.
The resistance of the other provincial States to the Act of Seclusion
bore no proportion to the vehemence of the Orangist movements in 1653.
The people were pacified now that the war, the cause of their misery, had
come to an end. The States General were unable to take any action
against Holland’s decision, legally justifiable but — from the federal point
of view — rather high-handed. In the province of Holland itself de Witt
succeeded after 1654 in consolidating his party. The town garrisons were
strengthened or, if necessary, replaced by more reliable ones, and in the
urban administrations de Witt sought to establish friends — often his own
relatives — through whom he could exercise influence. Through the Bicker
family, to which his wife belonged, and his own family he dominated to a
large extent the whole provincial government. Yet it was not without the
utmost efforts that towns and States were persuaded to take decisions, and
the legislative activity of the regime was remarkably slight. In two
matters only was de Witt able to take determined action. He reduced the
interest on Holland’s debts from 5 to 4 per cent and set aside the amounts
thus saved for amortisation, hoping that the whole debt could in this way
be paid off within forty-one years. The States General adopted a similar
measure. At the same time important parts of the army were disbanded.
There is no doubt that these decisions were sound. The appalling decline
of the Dutch army was not due to this reduction, but to the lack of a
commander-in-chief, to the nepotism and particularism growing rampant
in this State without a centre.
De Witt’s influence outside Holland was of course smaller still, though
it was fortunately more potent than his constitutional position and
principles permitted. The Grand Assembly had opted for provincial inde-
pendence, which benefited small cliques of regents, and de Witt was
unable to do a great deal to counteract this development. He was,
however, forced to intervene in the incessant conflicts which tore some
provinces and led to years of anarchy. It is surprising that all the conflicts
within urban or provincial governments, whether in Holland or in
Overijssel and Groningen, seem to have been quite naturally absorbed by
the antithesis of Orangism and the System of True Liberty. Yet the very
fact that de Witt’s regime in Holland was endangered by rival loyalties in
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other provinces made him an interested party in conflicts fought out in
sovereign republics other than his own. It is indeed true that Holland’s
provincial republicanism could not be confined to its proper limits and,
were it to live, would have to blot out the provincial frontiers which it
was so eager to write in black on the map of the Northern Netherlands.
If in this State broken by political barriers there was some kind of unity,
it was not because a united government transcended them but because
the political passions did.
Weak as this government was in domestic affairs, its foreign policy,
when it acted as the representative of Dutch commercial interests and was
able to make use of Holland’s immense financial power, could be very
vigorous indeed. After John de Witt had consolidated his party during
and after the first Anglo-Dutch War, he could assert Dutch influence
abroad in a more determined way. His intervention in the Baltic question,
so vitally important to Holland because of the dependence of the Dutch
economy on the Baltic trade, clearly demonstrates the character of his
foreign policy. When the Swedes began to strive for hegemony in those
areas it became necessary for the Dutch to take some action and to main-
tain the balance of power. Dutch policy now was based on friendship
with Denmark, which demanded high duties in the Sound but did not aim
at destroying Dutch trade. Already in 1649 an alliance was concluded
between the Republic and Denmark, which inevitably had an anti-
Swedish tendency, and the problem of the Sound dues was solved by
Dutch willingness to pay an annual duty of 350,000 guilders. During the
first Anglo-Dutch War these new relations asserted themselves. Sweden
gave some support to England, Denmark to the Republic. Yet de Witt
succeeded in staying neutral during the war started by Charles X of
Sweden against Brandenburg and Poland (1655) and in obtaining a
Swedish assurance that Dutch trade would not suffer any damage (Treaty
of Elbing, 1656).
De Witt’s reluctance to involve the Republic in the Baltic War sprang
from his fear that England and France would almost certainly take
Sweden’s side. He abandoned his neutrality only after the danger had
become less serious. In 1657 Denmark declared war on Sweden but
Charles X kept the upper hand, laid siege to the Danish capital and by the
Peace of Roeskilde (1658) acquired parts of Norway, the eastern shore of
the Sound and the assurance that both kings would prevent foreign war-
ships from entering the Baltic. This treaty did not end the war. In the
summer of 1658 Charles X reopened his attack hoping to be able to
dethrone the Danish king. The Baltic problem assumed the utmost
gravity since it was intolerable from the Dutch point of view to leave both
shores of the Sound under Swedish authority. At last de Witt sent the
Dutch fleet to the Sound; it defeated the Swedes and relieved Copenhagen.
Intensive diplomatic activity led in May 1659 to the Concert of The
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Hague: England, France and the Republic made it clear that they con-
sidered the Peace of Roskilde, interpreted in a way unfavourable to
Sweden, the basis of the situation in the Baltic and decided to force the
two northern kings to preserve this agreement. Force was indeed needed,
and the Dutch fleet provided it. The Swedish army capitulated and after
Charles X’s death in February 1660 the Peace of Copenhagen was signed
which was to the great advantage of the Dutch.
De Witt, during this complicated episode, demonstrated high qualities
of statesmanship. His position was difficult. Already during the first
stages of the conflict Amsterdam was inclined towards drastic action,
whereas the Grand Pensionary realised that sharp tension between the
Republic, England and France would be the inevitable outcome of such
high-handed proceedings. It was therefore only after England was
weakened by Cromwell’s death and France unable to give a demonstra-
tion of her power that de Witt took action. Thanks to this favourable
international situation he was able to take the initiative for joint interven-
tion by the three powers and to achieve the Dutch aims without risks.
For the first time in its history the Dutch Republic acted as a great power.
It did so cautiously and with moderation. It could act in this way because
of the temporary weakness of its rivals.
The circumstances of 1658 and 1659 caused the end of the illusion
nursed by the regents since 1648 that by careful neutrality the Republic
could withdraw from the international struggle for power. Commercial
interests forced the Republic into political activity. Dutch statesmen had
learned to acknowledge, however reluctantly, the status of the Republic
as a great power and to accept the responsibilities resulting from it.
De Witt grew active. The Peace of the Pyrenees of 1659 and the Restora-
tion in England cleared the sky of old troubles, and de Witt now saw the
opportunity to realise a great plan. Since none of the great powers was
any longer tied down by wars or alliances he attempted to bring about a
defensive alliance between the Republic, England and France which, had
it materialised, would have greatly strengthened the Dutch. De Witt was
right in looking upon friendship with potentially greater powers as the
only means for the Republic of maintaining its status. But the plan failed
because England and the Republic were unable to achieve a compromise.
De Witt apparently underestimated the vehemence of Anglo-Dutch eco-
nomic rivalry and the difficulty of persuading the neighbours to accept a
system of free trade which would enable the Dutch, with their better fleet
and their incomparably greater financial power, to check the development
of their competitors. The only possibility left was an alliance with France
alone and de Witt did not hesitate. It was concluded in 1662 and linked
with a commercial treaty in accordance with the wishes of the Dutch. It
is difficult to see what else de Witt could have done. The vulnerability of
the Republic compelled him to look for foreign support; English hostility,
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the weakness of Spain and of the Emperor limited his choice of allies.
Moreover, the Franco-Dutch alliance meant a success for John de Witt in
that the French statesmen, who had maintained intimate relations with
William II and for long years had regarded the republican regime with
great suspicion, now recognised its power and stability.
De Witt realised that his policy, however inevitable it might be, was
fraught with danger. Franco-Dutch collaboration was extremely pre-
carious, if not unnatural, in this period. From the Dutch point of view
Colbertism was just as intolerable as was French territorial imperialism.
The attempt to contain the latter by contriving a solution for the danger-
ous problem of the Southern Netherlands failed in 1 664, notwithstanding
de Witt’s persistence and his great intelligence and resourcefulness:
Louis XIV was unwilling to be tied by a compromise which would have
strengthened and confirmed the Franco-Dutch alliance. Events proved
that de Witt was right. Relations between England and the Republic did
not improve after 1660. It soon became clear that Charles II wished to
give a free rein to the economic struggle against the Republic, while the
common religious interests of which Cromwell had never lost sight in his
dealings with the States General no longer acted as a counterpoise. The
tension between both maritime powers grew rapidly. In West Africa and
North America the English African Company started an attack supported
by the navy which brought such serious damage to the Dutch West India
Company that the States General decided to order their fleet to reply.
After the war in Africa had been going on for some time it broke out in
Europe (January 1665), and after another couple of months official
declarations of war were exchanged.
This was a purely commercial war. 1 In the first Anglo-Dutch War, too,
economic interests had played a dominant part; but the situation then
had been largely ruled by Cromwell’s high idealism and by the dangers
inherent in the Orange-Stuart connection. In 1665 no political element
exercised any influence. The war found the Dutch ill-prepared, but much
more confident than in 1652. Holland’s finances were in perfect order.
The province did not have the slightest difficulty, in 1664 and in 1665, in
raising large amounts of money at low rates of interest and had sufficient
quantities of cash at its disposal. The navy was not in very good condition,
but it was easy enough to equip ships. With passionate determination
de Witt set himself to improving the fleet, and after some initial dis-
appointments he succeeded in making it so strong as to win supremacy.
The army constituted a much more awkward problem. When in Septem-
ber 1665 the quarrelsome Bishop of Munster invaded the eastern pro-
vinces in the expectation of getting English support, no Dutch troops were
available to stop him, and it was only due to French intervention that he
ultimately was forced to withdraw. The usefulness of the French alliance
1 See also below, ch. xm, pp. 309-10.
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was made clear. Although the French, notwithstanding their declaration
of war (January 1666), did not participate in actual warfare against
England their attitude helped to isolate Charles II. This isolation was
complete when de Witt succeeded in winning Denmark by the payment
of high subsidies, whereas lack of money prevented the Stuart king from
drawing Sweden into the war.
The Dutch position was therefore favourable when in April 1667
peace negotiations were opened at Breda. Or did Charles II possess
another card to play? It is possible that he promised to support Louis
XIV, who just when the diplomats gathered at Breda invaded the
Southern Netherlands and made his army advance rapidly northwards.
But de Witt’s prompt and effective action prevented Charles II from
profiting by what seemed for him an advantageous development: the raid
on the Medway (June 1667) ended the king’s hopes. Thereafter it was easy
to achieve a settlement. Thanks to de Witt’s statesmanlike and realistic
moderation the Peace of Breda (July 1667) was an earnest attempt to
reach a compromise. Cape Coast Castle in Africa and the New Nether-
lands were ceded to England, Surinam and in the East Indies Pulo-Run to
the States General. Some of the favourite Dutch principles were accepted.
England recognised that the flag covered the ship, the search of ships for
contraband was replaced by more civilised methods, and the definition
of contraband itself was confined to implements of war. Yet in practice
this arrangement did not open the way to any fruitful political co-opera-
tion of the two countries. The vehemence of the economic crusade against
the Republic hardly subsided, but the vigour and the reasonableness of
the Dutch helped to clear the atmospherp.
Louis XIV was impressed by this Dutch display of force and immedi-
ately invited de Witt to arrange with him a compromise concerning the
Southern Netherlands. Negotiations proved difficult and slow. When they
had virtually come to a halt Charles II decided to force de Witt into an anti-
French policy which led to the notorious Triple Alliance of January 1668.
De Witt had taken every possible care lest his relations with France should
be disturbed by England, but he was unsuccessful. The Triple Alliance of
Holland, England and Sweden, apparently a victory for Anglo-Dutch diplo-
macy because it held in check French expansion, was in fact only reluctantly
signed by the Grand Pensionary. It was the end of his cautious policy with
regard to France and enhanced the danger of isolation. But there was no
alternative. Charles II as well as the States of Holland, greatly annoyed by
Colbert’s vehement anti-Dutch tariff policy, forced de Witt to acquiesce
in an action of which he rightly feared the ultimate consequences.
Thus the Dutch Republic, while going from strength to strength, was beset
by increasing dangers. De Witt’s ingenious diplomacy could not prevent
the great powers from gradually rising from their weakness and being
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irritated by Dutch wealth and Dutch influence which were in part due to
their own shortcomings. In his domestic policy also de Witt’s very successes
helped to undermine his position. His handling of the Orange question
was masterly. The Stuart Restoration could not be without consequences
for the situation within the Republic. Charles II was William Ill’s uncle
and the Act of Seclusion was distasteful to the English king because it was
Cromwellian, and to de Witt because it was brought about by foreign
interference in Holland’s policies. It was repealed in 1660; but the pro-
vinces of Zeeland, Friesland and Groningen, disturbed by Orangist hopes
and Orangist intrigues, wanted to go much farther and proposed that
William be assigned the offices of his ancestors. Yet as long as Holland
refused their action was bound to remain fruitless, and Holland did
refuse. De Witt understandably feared the restoration of the Prince not
only because of the possible recrudescence of anti-republican tendencies,
but also because it would reopen the channels through which Stuart
influence could penetrate the Dutch State. Dynastic considerations were
likely to become predominant again, and of that, precisely, he and his
collaborators were most afraid. Something however had to be done.
De Witt made a counter-proposal : Holland, he declared, though not pre-
pared to tie itself to any firm promise, was willing to take over the burden
of educating the young Prince for the functions held by his ancestors.
This implied that the House of Orange was to be allowed a place in the
State if it could be made to acquiesce in the strictly republican form of
government and to sever its links with foreign princes.
The plan was not carried out. Charles II was naturally opposed to it.
A Prince of Orange imbued with the raison d'etat of republican regents
would not be a means of weakening the hated State; it was far more
advantageous to continue using him as pivot of paralysing conflicts. The
English ambassador to The Hague, Downing, and members of the
princely court started an elaborate pro-Orange propaganda campaign
which was a contributory cause of several popular movements during the
second Anglo-Dutch War. Though less vehement than in the early 1650’s,
they were strong enough to persuade some of the regents to ask for an
Orange Restoration. Under these circumstances, with the English War
going on, de Witt took up again his plan of having William III educated
by the States of Holland and this was carried out in 1666. The princely
palace was cleared of dangerous plotters; some months later the intrigues
of some members of the Orangist clique were brought to light, and this
led to the execution of one of them. De Witt himself took on the task of
initiating the prince into the arcana imperii, the difficult political questions.
It was certainly partly due to these measures that William III some years
later proved to have largely detached himself from the dynastic, naively
pro-English traditions of the Orange court. As a corollary the States of
Holland decided in 1667 to declare the offices of provincial stadholder and
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of captain-general and admiral-general to be incompatible and abolished
the stadholdership of the province of Holland altogether (Eternal Edict).
This was undoubtedly a success for de Witt, coinciding with his victory
over Charles II.
The Eternal Edict, however, did not solve the constitutional problem.
In the first place it was very difficult to extract similar decisions from the
other provinces; it was not until 1670 that de Witt succeeded in persuading
them to follow him, and even then only reluctantly and with reservations.
It was, moreover, doubtful whether this separation of military and
political power, however right in principle, made sense in a State like the
Republic. By what means was a Prince of Orange to be kept out of
politics after having been appointed commander-in-chief of the provincial
armies? In 1668 William III was, in his quality of representative of the
nobility, recognised as a member of the States of Zeeland and in 1670 he
entered the Council of State. Both functions were political functions.
De Witt’s glory reached its zenith in 1667 and 1668. The States of
Holland commissioned Wicquefort to write the history of the Dutch
Republic from 1648 to 1668, a short period in the development of a small
country, but so important as to be only paralleled by the most magnifi-
cent histories of past ages. 1 Yet serious dangers were threatening the
Grand Pensionary even in Holland. His very power exposed him to the
hatred of his former friends. Amsterdam seemed to move out of the reach
of his party when in 1664, after the death of Zuidpolsbroek, who had done
so much to support de Witt’s policy , ( the shamelessly ambitious Valckenier
acquired influence and ultimately turned away from the leader of the
States. It was even suggested in Amsterdam to transform the office of the
Grand Pensionary and to appoint a secretary of state for foreign affairs.
The plan was not carried out.
It is not difficult to explain in general terms the decline of de Witt’s
power. Yet his fall in 1672, as a consequence of the French War, came as
a surprise. On the whole the Dutch do not seem to have expected the
French attack. De Witt’s foreign policy was rather passive after 1668.
But before criticising de Witt because of his carelessness, it has to be taken
into account that the Dutch generally seem to have been unaware of the
degree of jealousy and hatred they inspired abroad, which in 1672 was to
lead to the joint attack of France and England upon the Republic.
Throughout 1670 and 1671 the rate of interest was low. It is surprising
how in their frequent negotiations with England the Dutch defended their
own commercial interests — the freedom of the seas — without realising
how much they irritated their adversaries. The Dutch hardly understood
foreign countries although they were great travellers and The Hague was
the centre of European journalism. They did not share in some of the most
striking tendencies of the seventeenth century, in royal absolutism, in
1 A. de Wicquefort, Histoire des Provinces-Vnies des Pals-Bas (Amsterdam, 1861), 1, 2.
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mercantilism, in the Baroque. The form of their political society, the struc-
ture of their trade, the character of their culture, seem at times like a
deviation from seventeenth-century patterns. Their conservatism, the late
medieval ways of their life, with its glories of municipal and provincial
independence, made them strangers in the world of their time. Their pros-
perity — exceptional in a period of vehement economic crises — their sober
religious tolerance, their aristocratic liberty hardly fitted into the century.
During de Witt’s period of office this separateness from Europe seemed to
grow stronger.
Therefore the attack of 1672 came as a painful contact with countries
where baroque absolutism and baroque raison d'etat ran wild. It is vain
to ask what particularly had awakened the ire of the Stuart and Bourbon
kings. The very existence of this Republic — announcing the Enlighten-
ment notwithstanding its old-fashioned ways — with its defiant wealth was
a paradox and a challenge. Colbertism, Louis XIV’s hurt pride, Charles
II’s unscrupulous methods and his adventurous domestic policies, the
traditional hatred of the Dutch among English businessmen, all this led to
the Treaty of Dover (1670) whereby the French and English kings agreed
to attack and divide between them this aristocratic republic — as Poland,
that other aristocratic republic, was divided a century later. England was
to acquire some towns and islands at the mouth of the Scheldt, but France
did not yet define what she intended to take; William III was to receive in
sovereignty whatever was left; and thus a peculiar anomaly would be
abolished. ,
Attempts made by de Witt in 1671 to strengthen his diplomatic position
did not meet with success. Neither the Emperor nor Spain were prepared
to commit themselves and Sweden chose the French alliance. The Bishop
of Munster and the Archbishop of Cologne, who also held the bishopric
of Liege, were glad to open their territories to Louis XIV’s triumphant
march against the Republic. At the beginning of 1672 the diplomatic
isolation of the United Provinces was almost complete. Towards the end
of March England declared war, in early April France followed suit.
While a Dutch medal of 1668 had depicted the roi soleil as the sun
brought to a standstill by Joshua, in May 1672 Louis began to move
against the United Provinces. Without any difficulty the French army of
more than 100,000 men under the personal direction of Louis XIV crossed
the Rhine near Elten on 12 June. The Dutch forces numbered about
30,000 men whose morale was bad and whose commanders were severely
handicapped by the authority exercised by the States of the various
provinces over the battalions paid from their contributions. Notwith-
standing de Witt’s resistance, the States General had in February 1672
appointed William III captain-general, but for one campaign only and
under somewhat crippling conditions. Although it was decided in 1 67 1 and
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again early in 1672 to increase the army, this had no immediate effect ; and
after the outlying defences on Dutch territory had been rushed the captain-
general could only withdraw his troops behind the water defences which
protected Holland (18 June).
As early as the end of June the fate of the Republic seemed to be
decided. Louis XIV established his headquarters in the province of
Utrecht. His armies were in control of Utrecht and Guelderland, whereas
the bishops of Munster and Cologne held the provinces of Overijssel and
Drente and part of Groningen. However, the town of Groningen offered
stubborn resistance and thus saved Friesland. The fall of the eastern
provinces looked like desertion. They seemed ready to leave the Union
and to seek allegiance farther east. Early in June the nobility of Overijssel
submitted to the Bishop of Munster, presuming that the dissolution of the
Union had already come about. Everywhere in the areas occupied by
Roman Catholic princes a religious revolution was carried out. The
Roman Catholic clergy re-entered into the possession of their old churches
and monasteries and showed themselves publicly at funerals and proces-
sions. The Jesuits founded schools in various towns. Yet Protestantism
was not prohibited, and nowhere do tensions of any importance seem to
have arisen. The Roman Catholic emancipation was carried out by order
of the occupying authorities; but qs Dutch Catholics were used to pinning
their faith on Spain, now on the way to becoming an ally of the Dutch,
and not on France, Louis XTV’s troops were not hailed as an army of
liberation, and his measures caused no repercussions among the Roman
Catholics of the still independent provinces. Yet the zeal with which the
Catholics in the conquered areas tried to return to their former position
shows how definite in their opinion was the fall of the Protestant State.
In Holland also, traditionally not only the economic and cultural but
also the military centre of the Republic, defeatism was rampant. Con-
sidering the catastrophic circumstances we may well wonder at its
remaining within such narrow limits. For a few days the States of
Holland were wavering to such an extent that it seemed possible they
would give up the struggle before it had started. The cause of this hesita-
tion was that de Witt, who had urged on the States the necessity of
resistance to the utmost, withdrawing if need be to Amsterdam as a last
redoubt, was suddenly removed from the scene of practical politics. On
the evening of 2 1 June he was attacked by four youthful Orangist partisans
and seriously wounded. Some days before, the States had agreed to open
negotiations with the enemy, but it was only now that they were started.
Soon, however, it became clear that France would not be satisfied with a
reasonable compromise. When her excessive demands became known
(1 July) it was no longer the States alone that stood before the task of
deciding whether to accept the humiliating demands designed to bring to
an end the greatness of the Republic.
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During these fateful days, with the enemy near the very insufficiently
protected frontier, the States of Holland were confronted with an addi-
tional problem of the highest importance. After the outbreak of the war
the Orangists had started a formidable propaganda campaign. Popular
movements were instigated in Dordrecht, Rotterdam, Gouda, Haarlem
and other towns, which aimed at the restoration of the Prince of Orange
to the traditional dignities of his ancestors. Most of the urban admini-
strations resolved to abolish the Eternal Edict and to proclaim William HI
stadholder of Holland. On Sunday night, 3 July, the States of Holland
took the difficult but inevitable decision. The States of Zeeland did
the same one day earlier, and the States General hurried to appoint
William IH to be captain-general and admiral-general, abolishing the
limiting conditions which had been imposed upon him (8 July).
One of the first political decisions made by the new stadholder was his
advice to the States not to accept the peace conditions put forward by
France and to continue the war. This advice was heeded and the negotia-
tions were broken off. Meanwhile the tensions in Holland were increasing.
The populace was by no means satisfied by the appointment of William HI
to the dignities of his ancestors. The Orangist successes of early July were
considered insufficient, although the towns restored to the stadholder the
right of nominating their magistrates. During July and August an
uninterrupted series of popular disturbances, sometimes stirred up by the
Orangists and never suppressed by them, undermined the authority of the
urban administrations and the States. It was not so much hatred of the
class of the regents as such which was expressed in these riots as suspicion
of their policies. Early in August John de Witt, recovered from his wounds,
handed in his resignation as Grand Pensionary, but he continued to be
accused by Orangist pamphlets which were eagerly read. De Witt, it was
thought, had stirred up the hatred of the Stuarts by his anti-Orangist
policies and had wished to surrender to France rather than restore the
Prince. On 20 August the great statesman and his brother Comelis
fell victims to the mob of The Hague, which neither the States nor the
urban administration dared, and which William IH did not desire, to
disperse.
William HI made use of the passions aroused. He rewarded some of
the murderers; some predikants praised God’s wisdom in punishing the
hated man. Seven days after the abominable act the States of Holland
decided to give the Prince a free hand in dealing with the urban govern-
ments. At last the wishes of the Orangist leaders were fulfilled. William IH
caused the regents who were most compromised by their adherence to
de Witt’s system to hand in their resignations. In September 159 members
of the urban administrations — the total number of sitting regents in
Holland was about 500 — were replaced by Orangists. It was not a com-
plete purge, nor was it a social revolution. The new members belonged to
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different families but to the same social group as the dismissed, who
incidentally were not molested or annoyed. This was the end of the affair.
On 27 September the States proclaimed an amnesty. The popular dis-
turbances receded, and if necessary they were suppressed by the urban
governments at last feeling safe. It emerges from this narrative that it
would be wrong to call the events of 1672 a revolution. Not only had
the constitutional forms been respected, the States having appointed
William III in a perfectly legal way to perfectly legal offices ; there had not
even been a revolutionary programme, for the rare requests for demo-
cratic reforms made in the pamphlets can hardly be regarded as such.
The outcome of these months of anger and suspicion was a murder, the
replacement of some ruling families by other families, and the appoint-
ment of a Prince of Orange to the offices held by his ancestors.
The enemies had been looking at the events in Holland without making
an attempt to profit by them. What was it that finally prevented Louis XIV
from delivering the coup de grace : premature self-confidence, impotence,
or the water defences? Which of his expectations were disappointed?
Towards the end of June he could probably have penetrated into Holland ;
but he did not move, haughtily waiting for a surrender which did not come
in the form he desired. He did not resume the attack : towards the end of
July he returned to France. His splendid army, reduced to 20,000 men,
lay idle in a hostile country until, thanks to Holland’s inexhaustible
financial power, the military forces of the Republic had been strengthened
and her diplomatic isolation broken by treaties with the Emperor, Spain,
Lorraine and Denmark; thus in 1674 the French were compelled to
withdraw. At the same time Charles II of England, forced by public
opinion, made peace. He had achieved nothing. From the beginning of
the war the Dutch fleet prevented English landings. In a series of impor-
tant battles the Dutch admirals maintained their naval supremacy. The
second Peace of Westminster (1674) was based on the status quo ante; it
was accompanied by a commercial treaty recognising the validity of the
liberal Dutch trading principles. It is, incidentally, noteworthy that now
the English profited from them because, thanks to their neutrality, they
were able to take the place left vacant in France by the Dutch. Some
months later the bishops of Munster and Cologne also made peace.
These events completely changed the character of the war. Having
started as an adventure of baroque power-politics, it continued after 1674
as the traditional conflict between the House of Habsburg and the House
of Bourbon. It looked, however, as though the old French fear of being
encircled by the House of Habsburg was gradually developing into a
desire to win supremacy in Europe. This, in any case, was the opinion of
William EH who, while the Dutch regents soon lost interest in, and did not
want to spend money on, a war which was no longer being fought on their
territory and did not immediately endanger Dutch independence, came to
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be convinced of his mission to fight French attempts at hegemony. The
means which the Dutch in their distress had been forced to use — the
coalition of as many anti-French powers as possible — became an instru-
ment of his policy.
The coalition was weak. The campaigns of 1675 and 1676 were indeci-
sive; the attempts of the Dutch in 1676 to establish their maritime
supremacy in the Mediterranean resulted in a minor Dutch victory in the
battle of the Etna (in which Michiel de Ruyter fell) and the important
French victory in the battle of Palermo. In 1 677 the French captured some
towns in the Southern Netherlands, but could not prevent William in
from laying siege to Charleroi (which he did not succeed in taking). Yet
the year 1677 was of great importance in the history of Europe because
Anglo-Dutch relations suddenly improved. Charles II of England con-
sented to the marriage of Mary, the daughter of his brother James, to
William III : for him only motives of foreign policy counted, so that this
second marriage treaty between the Houses of Stuart and of Orange was
completely different in character from the first which had united, merely
to the greater glory of the Orange dynasty, William in’s father to the
daughter of Charles I. William in acted in defence of the European
balance of power and spent his whole life in serving the doctrine which
had been advocated with such persuasiveness in the Bouclier d'Estat et de
Justice by the famous Imperial diplomat de Lisola (who died in 1674).
William understood that this system could never be established without
active English support. In March 1678 an Anglo-Dutch defensive alliance
was signed: a fact which was to dominate European history for many
years.
In 1676 peace negotiations began at Nymegen, but they progressed very
slowly. William HI was firmly opposed to them because he saw how suc-
cessful the French were in winning over the regents of the Dutch Republic
and, above all, those of Amsterdam, to the idea of breaking away from
the European alliance and of concluding a separate peace; for the war was
highly prejudicial to the Republic, the financial burdens were heavy, and
the merchants of neutral countries established themselves in the markets
formerly dominated by the Dutch. In August 1678 the French and the
Dutch indeed signed a separate peace. It was not unfavourable to the
Dutch: Louis XIV abolished the prohibitive tariffs of 1667 and allowed
the Dutch a measure of free trade, in flat contradiction to the protec-
tionist system of Colbert. William III, however, who knew that peace was
made, attacked the French army in a mood of desperate rage; but the
battle of Saint-Denis (near Mons) ended with a near-defeat for him. The
allies were reluctant to follow the Dutch example, but were unable to con-
tinue the war alone. Louis XTV abandoned most of his conquests,
retaining only Franche Comte and Valenciennes, Cambrai and St Omer
in the Southern Netherlands. Although he had not by a long way achieved
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his aims, the war ended with a diplomatic victory for him . The European
alliance was broken, and it was not likely that it could easily be restored.
William III rightly considered the Peace of Nymegen a defeat. The
following years were for him a period of frustration, during which the
French took advantage of their excellent diplomatic position to annex the
dekapolis in Alsace, Strassburg, Montbeliard, and Casale in northern
Italy (1681). The Quadruple Alliance signed in the spring of 1682 by the
Emperor, Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden only purported to
uphold the articles of the Peace of Nymegen, and the strong peace-party
in the Republic, as well as the Emperor, engrossed in a new war against the
Turks, were prepared to believe the assurances of Louis XIV that he did
not want to break these terms. Nevertheless the danger of a general war
constantly increased. In December 1683 Spain declared war on France
and French armies began to operate in Luxemburg and, soon afterwards,
in the Southern Netherlands. William III did his utmost to induce the
Republic to help Spain. The differences of opinion between Amsterdam,
supported not only by Holland but also by Friesland and Groningen, and
the Prince of Orange seemed to come to a head. For a moment it looked
as if he would use force to carry out his policy. But in the end, after
months of bitter discussions, sharp measures and an enormous output of
vehement pamphlets, he gave way to the wishes of his stubborn opponents.
The direct result was that Spain and the Emperor signed the humiliating
Armistice of Ratisbon (August 1684) whereby they ceded Luxemburg and
Strassburg to the French for a period of twenty years.
It was only in 1685 that Louis XIV overstrained his forces and spoiled
his splendid international position by reckless extremism. The Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes and the emigration of numerous Huguenots, of
whom many found refuge in the Dutch Republic, kindled among the
Protestants the fixe of the religious wars. Slowly a new anti-French coali-
tion was formed. In 1685 Brandenburg and the Dutch Republic signed a
defensive alliance. A year later the Emperor, Spain and most of the
German States entered the League of Augsburg which obliged them to
preserve the existing treaties. Louis XIV was fully aware of the reactions
provoked by his policy ; but instead of reasserting his prestige by caution
and conciliation, as he had done in the late 1670’s, he pursued his aims in
the most uncompromising way. The spectacle of the persecutions in
France, the many Huguenot refugees who settled in Holland and started
a powerful propaganda, had a decisive influence. The reluctance to go to
war which had dominated the Dutch Republic since 1678 began to recede.
When William HI saw the possibility of replacing his uncle and father-in-
law, James n, he asked the States for support, and Louis XTV’s over-
confidence helped William to achieve his purpose. The king was con-
vinced that his warnings would restrain the obstinate Prince of Orange,
but Louis’s German campaign in the autumn of 1688 provided William
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with an excellent opportunity. The States allowed the prince to sail,
equipped him with a sufficient army and an excellent fleet, and on 12
November 1688 he left for England.
After 1674 William Ill’s foreign policy belongs so clearly to European
history in its widest sense that it is perhaps of less interest to the student
of Dutch history than the analysis of the strength on which it rested. His
domestic policy was, above all, remarkable for its negative character: he
did not alter the organisation of the Republic. In a way this was unneces-
sary. The power he possessed was large ; the war he had to fight demanded
his entire attention. Yet it is surprising that this man of princely birth and
almost reckless boldness maintained the narrow framework of the ruling
oligarchy with its bourgeois outlook and its humanists’ contempt for the
populace; and it is paradoxical that he confirmed the oligarchic tendencies
and abuses by exploiting them. The explanation lies perhaps not so much
in his obvious indifference towards constitutional questions as in his
insight into the nature of Holland’s political system. It may be that his
unhappy youth had inspired in him a certain aversion to the mentality of
the regents; yet it was these early experiences which taught him how
cautiously the regents had to be handled and how formidable their
resistance could be. In 1674 he made an interesting attempt to acquire a
kind of sovereign status. His popularity was then at its height. The States
of Holland and Zeeland decided in February 1674 to make the stadholder-
ship an hereditary function. In April 1675 the States General did the same
for the offices of captain-general and admiral-general. Clearly these
decisions only confirmed an old tradition broken by the events of 1650
and 1651 and did not contribute much to the solution of the constitu-
tional problem. More important were the events in Utrecht, Guelderland
and Overijssel.
When the foreign armies left these provinces Holland proposed not to
allow them to reassume their seats in the States General, hoping to make
its own vote in the assembly more preponderant. William III saw the
danger and opposed the plan so strongly that it had to be abandoned. In
April 1674 the provinces returned to the States General. But then Holland
induced the assembly to grant William III the right of organising their
internal government according to his own wishes. He not only radically
changed the personnel of the governing bodies but introduced so-called
‘administrative regulations’ which, though maintaining the old forms,
gave him almost absolute power in these provinces. Then, in January
1675, Guelderland offered to William III, who had certainly suggested
this, the old ducal title which would have given him not only sovereign
authority but also sovereign status. William III was right in not accepting
this title without consulting the other provinces. In Holland and Zeeland
reactions were generally very hostile. Public funds fell as though a coup
d'etat were imminent. Everybody realised that the prince if made duke
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of Guelderland could not be denied the sovereign titles of Holland and
Zeeland. In Zeeland it was openly said that such a development would
be detrimental to the economic position of the country, since arbitrary
government was expected to undermine the confidence in institutions such
as the discount banks and the East and West India Companies. The idea
of one-headed government being b^ definition identical with arbitrary
government — the stock argument of all Dutch republicans — proved to be
current even among the Orangists. For in Holland and Zeeland it was
precisely the towns which had most exerted themselves for the restoration
of Orange rule that now most sharply turned against this plan. William III
did not hesitate to draw his conclusions. On 20 February 1675 he in-
formed Guelderland that he was unable to accept the sovereignty.
This was the Prince’s only attempt radically to change the constitutional
forms. Yet with his policy gradually concentrating on the one aim of
putting an end to French imperialism his need of power and money grew;
this could not be obtained by constitutional means only. It was inevitable
that he would strain the constitution. Not only his ancestors Maurice and
Frederick Henry had done this, even John de Witt had made his provincial
function into something which formally did not fit into the constitution.
But it is remarkable that William did not hesitate systematically to exploit
the same oligarchic practices which de Witt had already used in order to
strengthen his influence. However, what in de Witt’s time was a govern-
ment of relatives and friends was bound to degenerate under William III
into a government of corrupt clients. He sought to fill the councils and
governments of the towns, the States and the States General with people
who promised to obey him blindly. In Zeeland his relative Nassau-Odijk
used his position of princely deputy to exercise a completely unconstitu-
tional power by the most unscrupulous means. In some of the other
provinces scandals came to light which disclosed William Ill’s tactics, but
these exposures did not cause him to change his policy. At Rotterdam,
for example, the ‘griffier’, William Ill’s henchman, made a candidate
for the town council promise to obey, if elected, all the directives of
the stadholder on penalty of forfeiting a guarantee of 4000 guilders.
William III, though not directly involved in such affairs, did not try to
stop them, nor did he want to put an end to the rise of a closed oligarchy.
On the contrary, by undermining the responsibility and the independence
of the regents for the sake of his foreign policy, he accelerated this
development.
Looking back upon the history of the Dutch Republic during these
forty years one has the impression of seeing a climbing road. In de Witt’s
time the State, which had acquired full independence only in 1648,
became a great power, and under William EH it found an historical task
of supreme importance. This impression, however, is incomplete; for the
climax reached under William III was the beginning of the decline. The
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internal situation deteriorated; the oligarchic abuses increased; the
finances were thrown into disorder. The personal union between England
and the Republic — the term can of course be criticised from a strictly
constitutional point of view — gave the competitor of Holland the oppor-
tunity of surpassing its rival in the economic as well as in the political field.
Before 1680 the creative geniuses of seventeenth-century Holland had
already died: in 1669 Rembrandt, in 1672 de Witt, in 1675 Jan Vermeer,
in 1676 Michiel de Ruyter, in 1677 Spinoza, in 1679 Joost van den Vondel.
The inspiration of Dutch civilisation seemed to change. Huizinga has
characterised Holland’s seventeenth-century civilisation as a deviation
from the European pattern, an exception rather than an example. 1 The
realistic approach of the Dutch to nature, their distrust of baroque
grandeur, the simplicity of their behaviour, and the disorder of their style
of life and writing, unhampered by strict rules whether literary or political,
their fundamental tolerance and mildness made them strangers in Europe.
After 1680 this originality decreased. French classicism began to permeate
Dutch culture precisely at the moment when William HI succeeded in
checking French imperialism. But it was not only that foreign influences de-
prived the Dutch Republic of its profound originality and made it conform
to the dominating European fashion. At the same time foreign countries
were beginning to adopt Dutch ideas and Dutch social patterns. The En-
lightenment could lean on many Dutch achievements. And did not the
social circumstances of other countries too gradually develop in the same
direction? The strictly oligarchic regime, which was so queer and irritat-
ing a phenomenon in the eyes of absolute monarchs, was after all the pre-
figuration of a general European pattern. The political philosophy which
developed in the Republic in the seventeenth century, and which led from
Althusius’s aristocratic constitutionalism towards Spinoza’s democratic
absolutism, sometimes gives the impression of having traversed the same
course which was to be followed by the eighteenth century, from Locke
and Montesquieu to Rousseau. The Dutch Republic ceased to be the
economic, social, political and cultural anomaly which it had been, and
this may in part be an explanation of its decline.
1 J. Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken (Haarlem, 1949), 11, 45.
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CHAPTER XIII
BRITAIN AFTER THE RESTORATION
T he restoration of Charles Stuart to the thrones of England and
Scotland in 1660 nearly coincided with the assumption of regal power
by his cousin, Louis XIV of France. In each case, this meant the end
of an interregnum and the beginning of an era of personal, monarchic rule.
The two kings started with very different problems, for their countries
were strikingly contrasted in temper and institutions; but, by 1685, the
year of Charles’s death, France and England showed an apparent approxi-
mation, since Stuart rule was no longer parliamentary in the true sense of
the word ; in both countries Protestants were subjected to active persecu-
tion, and there even seemed a possibility that England might become little
more than a dependency of France. How that state of things was reached
is the subject of this chapter; how it was averted by revolution is the
subject of another. 1
Cromwell’s death in September 1658 had been followed by a period of
about twenty months during which the army leaders, Fleetwood, Lambert
and Monck, struggled for supremacy; until in January 1660 Monck, the
most astute and secretive man of his age, marched into England at the
head of the army of occupation of Scotland. Having left this army at
nearby Finsbury, the general proceeded to ‘countenance’ (that is, extend
unasked-for protection to) the remnants of the Rump at Westminster, now
reduced to about forty members, who represented the elderly survivors of
that Long Parliament which had initiated a great rebellion. Monck, who
was perceptive enough to see that monarchy could be peaceably restored
only by the civil power, brought back to the Commons (in February 1660)
the survivors of the Presbyterians who had been expelled by Pride’s Purge
in December 1648, thereby completely swamping the small residue of
republicans and visionaries to which the House had been reduced. On
16 March this reinforced Long Parliament effected its own dissolution
with a declaration that the ‘single actings’ of the House were not to
prejudice the rights of the House of Lords, thus anticipating the restora-
tion of a two-chamber legislature. Thereupon the Council of State busied
itself with drawing up a scheme of limitations which, it was thought,
might be imposed on Charles, whose recall to the throne was now con-
sidered certain, since the Presbyterian majority in the Commons was
monarchist. A general election returned a House of Commons in which
the royalists were strongly represented ; at the same time the Presbyterian
peers took their seats in the Upper House, soon to be joined there by the
1 See vol. vi, ch. vi.
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returning exiles. The Convention Parliament, which began its proceedings
on 25 April 1660, resolved that the government of the kingdom was in
king, lords and commons; Charles was proclaimed king, the year of his
restoration being reckoned not as the first but as the twelfth of his reign.
The king’s arrival at Dover on 25 May completed the Restoration.
The clue to much of the history of England under the last male Stuarts
can be deduced even from this meagre summary of events. It will be
noticed that the Restoration was not effected by armed intervention from
abroad, such as Charles and his brother James had tried to arrange while
in exile, nor even by a military coup at home, but by the prior reinstate-
ment of the two Houses of Parliament (however attenuated in numbers);
and it will be seen that, throughout, the lead was taken by Monck, with
the help of the Presbyterians, who believed in monarchy, and with the
concurrence of his army, which did not. In adopting a royalist policy
Monck had betrayed his soldiers, who were republican and anti-Stuart.
This largely accounts for long-continued resentment among the disbanded
veterans, resulting in many plots, especially in the earlier years of the
reign. It is for this reason that much of the legislation of this period can be
considered panic legislation. The Presbyterians, unlike the Sectaries, were
thinking in terms of an established church, a limited monarchy, and a
powerful hereditary aristocracy. Throughout the Commonwealth and
Protectorate they had remained distrustful of Cromwell; they had fought
for the king in the second Civil War, and had taken a leading part in the
restoration of his son; hence, they naturally assumed that toleration
would be extended to them, even if denied to the Sectaries. In this, like
Monck’s soldiers, they were betrayed. Lastly, there was the general
assumption that some at least of the lessons of the civil wars would be
taken to heart, and that such limitations would be imposed on the Crown
as to prevent the recurrence of events still fresh in public memory; might
not the tragedy of Charles I be the starting-point of a new and more
clearly defined prerogative? Unfortunately, however, there were many
who deduced the exactly opposite conclusion from that tragic event,
namely, that it must be avenged in blood. For long, opinion was sharply
divided between these opposed schools of thought. Meanwhile Charles
returned as a parliamentary sovereign, that is, as king in parliament, not
king in person; but events, soon to be described, severed his and his
successor’s connection with the institution which had called Charles home
from exile, and led to that irresponsible prerogative which was terminated
in 1688.
Why did parliament fail to impose conditions on the restored king?
The answer may be that Charles and his mentor Edward Hyde, afterwards
Earl of Clarendon, were determined to submit to no conditions ; on the
other side were the Commons of the Convention Parliament who, after
talking interminably of Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, came to
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no conclusion, possibly because no one among them had sufficient initia-
tive or audacity to bring in a Bill, or even formulate a resolution. Already
(April 1660) in the Declaration of Breda Charles had avoided any definite
promise of toleration; and Hyde, in correspondence with friends in
England, had urged that measures should be concerted in order to obviate,
as far as possible, the imposition of limitations. Thus the restored king of
1660 was as unfettered as his father had been; and, until about 1675,
Charles’s sovereignty could be described as parliamentary only in the
sense that, as the provision made by the Commons for the royal revenue
was inadequate, there was always the hope (unfulfilled) that parliament
would make good the deficiency. After 1675, on the other hand, the
revenue originally granted in 1660 proved to be more than sufficient for
peacetime purposes ; and so, unless he went to war, Charles was indepen-
dent of parliament. The same situation was created for James at the
beginning of the session of his one and only parliament. Here is the
cardinal fact which accounts for so much in the reigns of the two kings.
It came about in this way. The Convention Parliament wished to grant
to Charles an adequate revenue for life in addition to that which he
derived from Crown lands and royal perquisites. It was agreed that the
sum necessary was £1,200,000 per annum, from which the king would
have to pay not only for the upkeep of the royal estate, but also for the
peacetime maintenance of the navy and the salaries of judges and ambas-
sadors. It was not until 1697 that a Civil List in the modem sense of the
term was established ; until that date, the revenue granted by parliament
was applied to both personal and national expenditure. In order to make
up this agreed sum of £1,200,000 per annum, the Convention Parliament
settled on Charles, for his life, the revenue from the customs, usually
estimated at about £400,000 per annum, together with that from excise,
about £300,000 per annum, of which an annual sum of £100,000 was
settled on the Crown in perpetuity in compensation for the revenue sur-
rendered by the abolition of the Court of Wards. Several miscellaneous
items were added, such as revenue from the Post Office, from stamp
duties and, after 1661, from the hearth-tax, all of them together supposed
to yield about a million per annum. In actual fact the yield was less; and
so, in the first twelve years of the reign, there was a steadily increasing
debt which resulted in the Stop of the Exchequer of 1672, an admission of
partial bankruptcy. Charles had not been treated fairly by the Commons.
But the legislators of 1660 could not have foreseen that, with the great
development of trade and commerce, the yield from customs and excise
would so increase as to give the king a revenue of more than £1,200,000,
which, moreover, could be lawfully collected without recourse to parlia-
ment. This became obvious after Charles’s enforced withdrawal from the
third Anglo-Dutch War in 1674, when the Dutch were left to carry on the
war against Louis XIV and England enjoyed the unusual advantages of
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neutrality. By the time of James’s accession this, usually called the
hereditary revenye, amounted to about two millions. This is why Charles
after 1675, and James, after the parliamentary grant of the life revenue in
1685, were financially independent of parliament; only thus can their
policy be understood.
It has been noted that the arrangements made for Charles’s revenue
were bound up with the abolition of the Court of Wards. This court had
been established by Henry VIII to exact from all who held their lands of
the Crown by a free tenure a monetary equivalent for the services which
they had formerly performed, and to impose on those tenants, more
specially on their wards and widows, that personal supervision which had
been the prerogative of the medieval suzerain. The tenants so affected
were mainly those who held by knight service, and included practically all
those who today would be described as members of the landowning class.
By the statutory abolition of the court, this large class was emancipated
from a system not unlike one of death-duties; and in this way many
persons, including the most substantial in the land, were changed from
nominal tenants into actual freeholders. The statute did not, as is com-
monly maintained, abolish all feudal tenures; for copyhold was untouched
and remained an important tenure until its abolition in the twentieth
century, so that English landlords, wherever they had retained manorial
privileges, continued to exercise ‘feudal’ rights over their copyhold
tenants. But meanwhile the landlords were emancipated at the expense of
an additional excise falling on every consumer; and they were destined
to experience another advantage, because, after 1660, although there were
rebellions, there was no civil war, and so much less likelihood of for-
feiture for treason. Except for the burden of the land-tax, which fell
almost exclusively on them, the landlords after 1660 were in a particularly
favoured and powerful position. Indeed, as landed freeholders they
regarded themselves, not as one of several classes, but as the only fully
authenticated and responsible element in the nation. This was a fact so
implicit that it was seldom enunciated. It had several important conse-
quences. Their freehold, which we are inclined to associate with privilege
or monopoly, came to be identified with freedom, in a wide sense of the
word, that is, freedom of action, whether as members of the Grand Jury
or of the House of Commons, and this was regarded as the best safe-
guard, not against bribery, but against intimidation. This distinction was
for long considered perfectly natural, and underlay both the revolution of
1688 and the politics of the eighteenth century.
The two main objects of the restoration settlement, as achieved by the
Convention Parliament, were to end the period of constitutional experi-
ment and to bridge the gap between the interregnum and the monarchy.
With regard to the first object, it was tacitly assumed, and later enacted,
that all Acts and Ordinances to which Charles I had not given his assent
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were invalid; but some of the most important of these measures were
re-embodied in statute, with amendments or enlargements. An example is
the Navigation Act of 1660. By the Act of Indemnity the surviving
‘regicide judges’ and about twenty other persons, who had failed to
change their coats quickly enough, were exempted from mercy, of whom
about a dozen, including Sir Henry Vane, suffered the death penalty.
The land settlement caused much dissatisfaction, for there had been so
much exchange and purchase of confiscated lands that no satisfactory
solution could have been devised. Crown and Church lands were restored ;
the lands of several prominent royalists were recovered by special legisla-
tion, but the small fry were left to find what remedy they could in the law
courts. In this way, many Cromwellians, who had acquired land cheaply
during the Usurpation, obtained permanent places in the landowning class,
and soon the Whig party derived strength from such new aristocratic
owners of broad acres.
These facts help to explain why the events of 1660 are described not as a
revolution, but as a restoration. In little more than eight months the Con-
vention Parliament had bridged the gap and had dealt successfully with
every urgent problem except the land settlement and the vague promise of
toleration held out in the Declaration of Breda. Meanwhile, the royalist
tide was steadily rising and reached its climax in the early sessions of the
Cavalier Parliament, or Long Parliament of the Restoration, which lasted
from May 1661 to January 1679. In the course of eighteen years this
parliament completed the most notable evolution in English history. Its
character was undoubtedly influenced by many by-elections, but its
composition remained essentially the same, namely landowners and the
nominees of landowners, with a sprinkling of merchants, lawyers, place-
men, army and navy officers: a heterogeneous body, within which there
was probably a hard core of young royalists who grew up into middle-aged
and disgruntled Whigs.
The Cavalier Parliament began by passing measures intended to
emancipate the king, as far as possible, from limitations or control. One
statute conferred on him supreme control over all the armed forces by land
and sea; another, by greatly extending the scope of the treason laws, made
it easier for the Crown to dispose of critics and opponents; a Licensing
Act created a new official, the Surveyor of Imprimery, with wide powers
over authors and printers of unlicensed books; an Act against tumultuous
petitioning limited the right of the subject to petition; lastly, the Corpora-
tion Act attempted to confine membership of corporations to Anglicans
and loyalists. This last measure, usually, but not quite accurately regarded
as part of the ‘Clarendon Code’, laid down the rules which, as later
extended by the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678, came to be imposed as con-
ditions of full citizenship, namely, swearing the oaths of allegiance and
supremacy, with a non-resistance oath, together with the taking of the
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England at least once a
year. By the Act of Uniformity (1662) all beneficed clergy who had not
received episcopal ordination were obliged to give up their benefices, a
measure which had the effect of increasing the strength of Protestant
Nonconformity by adding to its numbers many clergy and laymen who
today would be regarded as low church or evangelical. In this way was
created an Anglican monopoly which extended to the Church, the uni-
versities, the schools and, later, to citizenship itself.
It remained only to penalise the Dissenters, including the Presbyterians.
This was done in a series of measures, passed in the years after 1664 and
known, with whatever justification, as the ‘Clarendon Code’. The Con-
venticle Act of 1664 prohibited assemblies of five or more persons for a
religious purpose; the Five Mile Act of 1665 forbade all teachers and
preachers who had not taken the oaths to come within five miles of a
corporate town. An intensive campaign against the Dissenters accom-
panied these measures, and the militia was employed to assist the civil
power. For these severities, little, if any, blame can be attached to Charles
himself, for at this time he inclined to tolerance; nor can the clergy of the
Church of England be blamed, since they were not responsible for the
legislation. The fact appears to be that the king was obliged to acquiesce
at the price of special parliamentary grants. The responsibility lay with
the majority of the House of Commons, who were thinking in terms of
revenge— revenge for the death of Charles I. To them, all forms of Dis-
sent — Presbyterian, Quaker and Baptist alike — appeared to be treasonable ;
only by adhesion to the Church of England could a man’s loyalty be
attested. As for the Roman Catholics, they were still subject to the harsh
legislation of Elizabeth’s reign; but in practice that legislation was neither
uniformly nor harshly enforced on the Catholic laity who, though
suffering from disability, were neither persecuted nor denied civil rights.
Before the end of the reign, however, though their status remained the
same, the attitude towards them completely changed, and there was
instilled into English minds that distrust and hatred of popery which
survived into recent times.
By April 1661 the Restoration in England can be considered as com-
plete. In that month Lord Chancellor Hyde, who had served the king in
exile and later acted as informal chief minister until his disgrace and exile
in 1667, became Earl of Clarendon; General Monck was created Duke of
Albemarle; Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had changed his allegiance in
good time, became Baron Ashley and afterwards, as Earl of Shaftesbury,
the founder of the Whig party and the most formidable opponent of the
king. On St George’s Day, 23 April 1661, Charles was crowned in West-
minster Abbey and liberally anointed with holy oil ; indeed, in no other
instance did inunction prove so efficacious, for he was to win great popu-
larity as a most successful ‘toucher’ for the King’s Evil. Coronation was
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followed by marriage. This took place on 21 May 1662 at Portsmouth,
where he married the Infanta Catherine of Braganza in two ceremonies, the
one Anglican, the other Catholic. The young Portuguese bride brought,
as part of her dowry, Tangier and Bombay, of which the first, after a pre-
carious occupation, was surrendered in 1 683, while the second became after-
wards the basis of British power in India. The marriage was favoured by
Louis XIV, anxious to secure English as well as Portuguese help against his
father-in-law, Philip IV of Spain ; indeed, so anxious was Louis to see this
marriage effected that he provided a sum of about £50,000. Thus early
in his reign was Charles pledged to furthering the designs of his French
cousin.
Concurrently with these events the Restoration was completed in
Ireland and Scotland. On the whole, Ireland was comparatively fortunate
in the period 1660-88, mainly because the Stuarts sympathised with the
Celtic Irish, and because they had at their disposal the services of James
Butler, Duke of Ormonde, one of the best of Irish viceroys, who held
office from 1661 to 1668, and from 1677 to 1684. The duke’s political
fortunes were at first bound up with those of his fellow statesman
Clarendon, who was soon superseded in the royal favour by young, flashy
men, such as Arlington and Buckingham; but fortunately Butler was
restored to power in 1677 and succeeded in guiding the country through
the difficult years of the Popish Plot and the Stuart reaction. Ormonde’s
task was to diminish, as far as possible, the traditional exploitation of
Ireland by creatures of the English court. He also did much to encourage
the development of native industries, notably the linen industry. For this
purpose he introduced skilled workers from France and Flanders, but the
industry was afterwards concentrated in Protestant Ulster. Generally, the
restoration settlement in Ireland was similar to that in England. In 1662
by an Irish Act of Uniformity the recently revised Prayer Book was im-
posed on the (Protestant) Church of Ireland, and oaths of non-resistance
and repudiation of the Solemn League and Covenant 1 were required of all
teachers and clergy. The Roman Catholics were excluded from office, but
they were not persecuted. The two Irish Houses of Parliament resumed
their sessions, but their initiative in the introduction of Bills was seriously
limited by the control exercised through the English privy council;
accordingly, much of Irish legislation in this period was little more than
a reproduction of English statutes, many of them in the interests only of
the Anglo-Irish. In effect therefore the Irish Catholics continued to be
pariahs, but at least their industries were encouraged, and they were not
interfered with in the exercise of their religion.
As in England, the land settlement proved to be the most difficult prob-
lem, and for the same reason, because so much land, confiscated during
the Usurpation, had changed hands several times. Further complications
1 For this, see vol. rv, ch. xvm.
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resulted from the Irish Rebellion of 1641-3, 1 when so many Protestants
had been dispossessed, and from the Cromwellian conquest, when many
Catholics had been displaced by English soldiers and ‘adventurers’, that
is, land speculators. This large class of (mostly small) landowners,
supposedly of republican sympathies, was obviously objectionable in the
eyes of Restoration statesmen ; so too, at the English court were those who
insisted on large grants of Irish acres, while in Ireland there were many
‘innocent Papists’ who had been unjustly deprived of their lands. The
sympathies of Charles were with this last class, but he was obliged to sacri-
fice them to the courtiers. The general result was that, out of nearly 8000
dispossessed Roman Catholic landlords, only about 1300 were restored;
while many of the soldiers and ‘adventurers’ had to quit possession. The
land thus available was bestowed in large grants upon court favourites,
many of them absentees; and the harshness shown by most of their
bailiff’s served, even in this comparatively beneficent period, to make the
name of Englishmen detested in Ireland.
That name would have been equally detested in Scotland had not the
northern kingdom been consigned to renegade Scots. Many of these had
begun as opponents of episcopacy ; but, now that the old altars were over-
turned, they were anxious to persecute the prophets whom they had
formerly revered. These men would as willingly have become Turks had
the Stuarts decided to establish Mohammedanism in the north. Notable
among them was John Maitland, afterwards Earl of Lauderdale, secretary
of the Scottish privy council who, in effect, ruled Scotland until 1680, a
curious mixture of coarseness, pedantry and absolute loyalty to his royal
master. The Stuarts had little love for the land of their origin; its
Protestantism and poverty stirred their dislike; and, in the absence of
institutions providing some protection for the liberty of the subject, the
northern kingdom was helpless in the hands of agents of absentee kings.
The harshness with which this system was enforced steadily increased.
When in 1661 the ‘Scottish Church’ was restored this meant the restora-
tion of the episcopacy which Charles I had so unwisely tried to enforce
upon the Scots. At the same time a notable victim was found, when the
Earl of Argyll, secular head of the Presbyterians in Scotland, was brought
to ‘ trial ’ and executed ; his offence having been that, in private letters sent
to Monck (forwarded to the court by Monck) he had used terms implying
approval of the Commonwealth. This was a foretaste of the treatment
soon to be accorded to Presbyterians and Covenanters.
Historians emphasise that these royalists were bigots, but it should be
added that they did not have a monopoly of that quality. In Scotland there
was no vigorous local administration as in England; juries could be fined
and imprisoned for their verdicts; with few exceptions, the judges deferred
to the wishes of the executive in political trials. The ancient Estates of the
1 For this, see vol. iv, ch. xvin.
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realm still met (in one chamber) in the Parliament House of Edinburgh;
but, by law, the mixing of Estates was prohibited, and so the Third
Estate consisted of merchants and tradesmen who, as they were limited to
matters of trade and commerce, were debarred from expressing an opinion
about the administration. That administration was directed by the
Scottish privy council, taking its orders from Whitehall. Another body
through which the Crown could enforce its will was the Committee of the
Articles which, usually acting on instructions, decided on the measures to
be put before the Estates. For these reasons there was practically no
political life in seventeenth-century Scotland. Justice was administered by
baronial, that is, semi-private courts; the supreme courts in Edinburgh
were presided over by judges even more obsequious than those in West-
minster Hall. Torture could be freely employed to extract ‘ confessions ’, and
in this period the thumb-screw (imported from Muscovy) was substituted
for the ‘ boot ’, which was unsuitable for people with thin legs. These things
did not matter much, as Scotland was such a poor and undeveloped
country; but they provide a significant comment on Stuart rule. It is not
surprising that many Scots, fleeing from ‘justice’, took refuge in Holland,
to return later with William of Orange.
At the time of the Restoration, however, these were still matters of the
future. In England there was genuine relief that the rule of the army and
the Saints was over, and that the country was at last restored to its rightful
king. The king was determined to combine two barely compatible
objects — to have his own way, and to avoid any more foreign travel;
his comparative success in the first and his complete success in the second
were the results of consummate skill and an instinctive political sense.
His contemporary popularity was slightly diminished by the conduct
and events of the second Anglo-Dutch War. 1 Pepys was not the only
observer of the desperate condition to which English and Scottish sailors
were reduced by denial of pay and the provision of half-poisoned food;
there was also the disgrace of the Medway in 1667, when some of the best
ships in the navy were burned or towed away by Dutch small craft. For
these things a convenient scapegoat was found in Clarendon, who was
forced into exile. This second Anglo-Dutch War had created a diplomatic
difficulty for Charles, because, at that time, Louis XTV happened to be
committed by treaty with the United Provinces and went to their help as
an ally. On the English side, the war had been entered into at the solicita-
tion of the many trading interests which suffered from Dutch competition
or open hostility — in this sense it was a national war, but Charles had
entered into it unwillingly because it entailed hostilities with France.
Nevertheless, Louis acted chivalrously with his cousin, giving as little help
as possible to his Dutch partner, who was left to bear the brunt of the
fighting, and assuring Charles that he fully appreciated the difficulties of
1 See also above, ch. xn, pp. 288-9.
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his position. The war was ended by the Treaty of Breda (July 1667):
England obtained New York and New Jersey, but the Dutch retained
Pulo-Run and Dutch Guiana, and the French Acadia and French Guiana;
in other words, England failed to gain a footing in the spice trade, and the
Hollanders were as formidable as ever at sea. A further strain on Stuart-
Bourbon relations was imposed by the formation of the Triple Alliance of
1668, an alliance of England, the United Provinces and Sweden against
the aggressions of Louis. Charles’s private expressions of regret for this
unfortunate alignment of forces were favourably received at Versailles,
where it was well known that he was at the mercy of heretics and corrupt
legislators. On the other hand, Louis had no doubt that the Dutch, who
(it was alleged) owed their independence to France, had betrayed their
benefactor. Accordingly, after 1668, the situation in western Europe was
this : Louis’s righteous indignation was directed against a former ally, to
whom he had given only nominal support; and his friendship was
extended to a former enemy, with whose king he was in secret sympathy.
Why not join openly with Charles against the Dutch? And what advan-
tages might not accrue to the cause of Catholicism in England if the
Dutch were eliminated? The Stuart king, strengthened by a successful war
against England’s chief rival, would be in a position to promote the cause
of the true faith among his turbulent subjects.
This view was not shared by Colbert, Louis’s minister, who believed
that Dutch prosperity could be destroyed, not by war, but by a com-
mercial alliance of England and France directed against the United
Provinces. Negotiations for such a treaty began, but they broke down
mainly because of French insistence on English conformity with French
standards of measurement. Accordingly, Louis stepped in where his
minister had left off; emissaries from the two countries continued to cross
the Channel, but for a very different purpose, namely to negotiate what
came to be known as the Secret Treaty of Dover. By the end of 1669 it was
agreed that Louis would supply money to Charles for two distinct enter-
prises — the restoration of Catholicism in England and a war of annihila-
tion against the Dutch. The treaty was signed 22 May/i June 1670. By its
terms Charles agreed to join with Louis in hostilities against the Dutch, in
consideration for which Louis promised to pay an annual sum of three
million livres (about £250,000) and agreed that Charles’s share of the
spoils was to be Walcheren, Sluys and Cadsand. In the event of Louis’s
acquiring any fresh rights to Spanish territory, Charles was to assist in the
enforcement of these rights. He further promised to declare himself a
Roman Catholic, but in doing so was to choose his own time, and the
reward for this was to be the equivalent of about £160,000, together with
the services of 6000 troops for the suppression of disorders which might
follow the declaration. Of the members of the Cabal (the name given to
Charles’s informal body of five advisers) only Clifford and Arlington were
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in the secret; the other three, Ashley, Buckingham and Lauderdale, knew
nothing of the religious part of the bargain.
Between April 1671 and February 1673 parliament was prorogued. In
this interval Charles tried a compromise which, it seemed, might have
gone some way towards fulfilling the religious clause in the secret treaty.
This was the issue, on 25 March 1672, of the Declaration of Indulgence,
whereby the king suspended the execution of all penal laws against
Dissenters and all who refused the oaths. Roman Catholics were to be
allowed to worship in their own houses. By this measure, only the Crown
would suffer, because it would have to sacrifice the revenue from the fines
imposed on recusants. As regards the war on the Dutch, Charles was
influenced by the steadily mounting debt which obliged him to acquiesce
in the Stop of the Exchequer (January 1672); and so, two days after the
Declaration of Indulgence he declared war on the United Provinces.
Hence, unlike the two earlier Anglo-Dutch wars, the third was in no sense
a national war, but was entered into by the king, on his own initiative, in
order to qualify for the French subsidy.
When parliament reassembled in February 1673 a majority in the
Commons, supported by an influential group in the Lords, demanded that
the Declaration of Indulgence be withdrawn, on the ground that only the
legislature could suspend penal laws in matters of religion. It is at this
point that one can detect the beginnings of an opposition party in the
Commons — the Country party — distinguished from the Court party in
the sense that it was not honoured by the recognition of the Crown. At
this time also, Lord Chancellor Shaftesbury was apprised of the secret
clause in the treaty, and he now directed himself to the formation of an
opposition in the Lords; and even Charles was unable to play off one
House against the other. Rather than be sacrificed on behalf of the
Catholics, the king withdrew the Declaration of Indulgence on 8 March
1 673. He was just in time. Nor did he stop there. A few days later he gave
his consent to the first Test Act which incapacitated from public office all
who refused to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, together with
the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England, and a
repudiation of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The immediate con-
sequence of this was that James, Duke of York, a recent convert, was no
longer able to hold the office of Lord High Admiral; a less direct con-
sequence was that parliament obliged Charles to withdraw from the war by
theTreaty of Westminster (February 1674). By this treaty the Dutch agreed
to pay an indemnity, but otherwise its terms were inconclusive and left no
opening for the English in the East Indies; on the other hand, England,
now neutral, was able to seize some of the markets of her rival and enemy. 1
Meanwhile in September 1673 an ominous event had occurred — the
marriage of the convert James to the Catholic Mary of Modena. By his
1 See also above, ch. xn, p. 295.
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first marriage (with Anne Hyde) James had two daughters, Mary and
Anne, who were being brought up in the Protestant faith; as for the king
and his consort, it was now considered certain that they would never have
an heir. It was also regarded as a certainty that James would have an heir
by his new wife; indeed, this matter of presumptive fecundity had played
an essential part in the duke’s choice of a bride, a choice in which Louis
had exercised considerable influence. Hence, it is of some significance
that the emergence of an opposition party coincided with the begi nnin gs
of fears about the succession — fears that eventually England would be
ruled by a Catholic dynasty, allied with kindred dynasties on the Continent
and convinced that heresy was the greatest of all evils. This fear had
already found expression in parliament’s insistence upon the withdrawal
of the Declaration of Indulgence and the speedy passing of the Test Act. It is
important that the initiative for this step was taken, not by the Church but
by the legislature, and for a secular purpose : to preserve, so far as that could
be done by the imposition of a formulary, the two things which were then
regarded as inseparable, the Protestantism and independence of England.
Inspection of the Test Act of 1673, as amplified by that of 1678, shows
that of positive theology there was nothing, except the production of the
sacramental certificate; of negative theology there was a good deal,
namely rejection of certain doctrines fundamental in Roman Catholi-
cism; the rest was made up of political safeguards intended to ensure
the loyalty and obedience of the swearer. Lastly, by the Act of 1678, all
these oaths and repudiations had to be taken ‘in the plain and ordinary
sense of the words’; which meant that this was a layman’s profession of
faith. The imposition of these Acts was not ended in its entirety until
1829 ; but long before that date the system was mitigated in favour of those
Protestants who had held office without having taken the oaths; and, in a
manner not easily explicable today, the Test Acts came to be regarded, by
Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Dissenters alike, as a bulwark against the
threats to English independence. Even more, the system came to be asso-
ciated with enlightenment as well as a large measure of toleration, 1 and was
praised by Voltaire, 2 because its effect was to create an Erastian Church
where the clergy was kept in its place and debarred from that secret,
irresponsible influence which it exercised in eighteenth-century France.
In this year 1673 the secret of the Treaty of Dover was still well kept;
but the public events already enumerated caused many contemporaries to
suspect that some hidden work of darkness was on foot. They were right.
Nor would their fears have been allayed if the king had taken them into
his confidence and explained that he intended to keep his promises as
little as possible. The fears evidenced by Englishmen at this time were
1 As exemplified by the Toleration Act of 1689. Roman Catholics were not included in
this measure and continued to suffer from disabilities, but were not persecuted.
2 In the Lettres Anglaises.
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reasonable fears, justified by public events, and capable of substantiation
by reference to secret facts. Accordingly, they cannot be dismissed as the
result of ‘propaganda’. In undertaking the commitments of the Secret
Treaty of Dover, Charles II was concerned more about obtaining French
money than about attempting to enforce Catholicism on England ; but can
we be equally sure about the character and intentions of the Duke of York?
Charles, nationally popular almost because of his failings, was contrasted
with his brother, who was formidable because of his virtues — the virtues
of industry, religious fervour, consistency and determination to attain his
ends at all costs. It is from this point that many Englishmen, Anglicans and
loyalists, came to regard James as a menace, a menace soon to be elevated
into a terror by the steadily accumulating suspicions of the years after 1 673.
Why did the reasonable fears of 1673 become the wild panic and
hysteria of 1678, the year of the Popish Plot? It may be doubted whether
historians have ever given a satisfactory answer to this question. Part, at
least, of the answer may be forthcoming from an unexpected source: one
of the clauses of the Statute of Frauds, a measure passed in 1677, on the
eve of the Plot. This clause included, as one of the conditions of the
validity of contracts for the sale and purchase of goods above £10 in value,
a note or memorandum signed by both parties. Here was an attempt by
the legislature to deal, if only indirectly and in part, with what was known
to be the chief social evil of the age — perjury. In a period of universal
oath-taking, many shopkeepers were willing to come into court in order
to swear falsely (usually with the help of their apprentices) that a pros-
pective customer had verbally undertaken to make certain purchases; and
so the Statute Book provides the best possible evidence of the prevalence
of this evil. At that time perjury, for a first offence, was only a mis-
demeanour; hence, while a man who stole five shillings was likely to be
hanged, if he obtained the same sum by perjured evidence resulting in the
death of an innocent man he was punished only by a small fine and an
appearance in the pillory. Unfortunately, the solitary voice raised against
this iniquity had been that of the (reputedly) atheist Hobbes, 1 a fact which
may have induced many good and pious men to tolerate an obvious evil.
The same was true of forgery, which did not even begin to be a felony
until the issue of Bank of England notes in the last years of the century
obliged the legislature to change the law. Hence, in the reign of Charles II,
to concoct a wild story of a plot, incriminating named and prominent
persons, with the hope that they would suffer death on the strength of
forged or perjured evidence, did not seem particularly mean or dis-
honourable, especially as one could obtain the services of professional
perjurers so cheaply. Nor was it even a risky enterprise, since, if dis-
covered, it might result only in an appearance in the pillory, possibly
before sympathetic spectators.
1 Leviathan, ch. xxvu.
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In these circumstances, the discovery of ‘plots’ and their authentication
by sworn evidence was almost a hobby in the seventeenth century. Titus
Oates might never have been heard of but for a combination of circum-
stances very lucky for him and very unlucky for a number of perfectly
innocent men, mostly Roman Catholics. His first asset was his wonderful
memory — he could remember all his own lies; the second was his doc-
torate of Divinity, supposedly conferred upon him by the University of
Salamanca; the third was his shrewd psychology which enabled him to
perceive that the time was ripe for taking advantage of the fears and
suspicions which had been mounting for nearly a decade. Then there was
the ‘gift’ of the murdered body of the Protestant magistrate. Sir Edmund
Berry Godfrey, discovered near Hampstead in October 1678. Godfrey
had been unfortunate enough to be the recipient of the sworn depositions
of Oates about a great ‘plot’, directed by the pope and the Jesuits, having
for its main purpose the assassination of the king and his replacement by
James. This was to be followed by a general massacre of Protestants. It
seemed obvious to contemporaries that as Godfrey, the unwilling cus-
todian of so much secret information, was too dangerous to live, he must
have been removed by the Jesuits. So extraordinary was the wave of
hysteria which passed over England in the following months that, with the
exception of the king (who may have inherited the Highland gift of
second sight), nearly all the prominent personages of the time believed in
the plot — indeed, belief in the plot became a criterion of patriotism. In
all this, a lead was given by Shaftesbury, who co-operated with Oates in
the drilling of witnesses; and, in consequence, about a score of victims
suffered death.
The influence of the plot can be seen in the creation of some kind of
party distinction. There were many earlier examples of a dualism in public
opinion, and as early as 1673 there was evidence of such a division in
parliament, which for long refused to admit publicly the existence of any
such distinction. But it was the Popish Plot which made popular and
national a dualism that was ultimately to create our party politics. This
was at first a simple contest between those who were for the court and
those who were against. Supporters of the court included believers in
Divine Hereditary Right, with its corollary of passive obedience or non-
resistance, that is, obedience to the lawful commands of the anointed
sovereign and submission to his unlawful commands. Advocates of these
doctrines professed willingness to obey the sovereign even to the point of
martyrdom, but in practice they were not so foolish; and the Anglican
clergy, the main supporters of this view, contended that there was no need
to provide a martyr from among themselves, as Charles I had already died
on their behalf. As the Stuarts, at times, were credited with willingness to
use Irish ruffians against Protestant Englishmen, the word Tory, or Irish
cut-throat, was the nickname applied to these supporters of the preroga-
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tive. From their text-book, the Old Testament, they derived conclusive
proof that the Lord’s Anointed can do wrong; in fact, he is more likely to
do wrong than right; but, as he is responsible to God alone, his subjects
can do little about it, save recognise that in this indirect way God
punishes the sins of humanity.
As Ireland supplied one term of abuse, Scotland supplied the other,
there being nothing in English life sufficiently opprobrious for the pur-
pose. It was in this period that events in the northern kingdom again
acquired significance for English observers, events which have to be
briefly recorded. In the south-west of Scotland were many Presbyterians
who, as they refused to conform to the episcopal church, were proscribed
and actively persecuted; and, early in 1678, an attempt was made to goad
them into rebellion by quartering on their farms and homesteads a body of
6000 Highland robbers and bandits known as the Highland Host. This
attempt failed; the clansmen retired with their booty, and many Scots
migrated to northern Ireland. In May 1679 a crime was added which
further embittered opinion and led to brutal reprisals; this was the
murder of the hated James Sharp, archbishop of St Andrews, an event
followed within a few weeks by the defeat of Graham of Claverhouse at
the hands of a body of Covenanters (battle of Drumclog). This caused
Charles’s government to send Monmouth to the north in command of
troops which were to be reinforced by Irish Catholics; but, before the
latter arrived, the duke succeeded in defeating the ill-armed Covenanters
at the battle of Bothwell Brig (June 1679). By this time the extreme
Presbyterians, who had repudiated allegiance to the Stuarts and were
either ‘on the run’ or in active rebellion, were known as Whigs— the
nickname now applied to those English critics of Charles’s government
who had formerly been known as the Country party.
This party included a large proportion of wealthy merchants and
Dissenters and was well represented in the House of Lords; indeed, it was
an aristocratic party, deriving some strength from the fact that many of its
devotees had the best racehorses. The Tory University of Oxford was a
poor second to the Whig Newmarket. Protestants almost to a man, the
Whigs dared to criticise the monarch on the ground that his policy was
endangering the national faith and leading to the subordination of
England to Louis XIV. Or rather they dared to criticise his ministers,
such as Danby, whom they attempted to impeach late in 1678; but they
failed because Charles gave him a full pardon in advance. The Whigs had
deduced from the tragedy and futility of Charles I’s execution the lesson
that it was useless to press home an accusation of guilt on the king him-
self— the accusation must be directed against the royal agents; and so they
revived the old common-law maxim : ‘ the king can do no wrong ’, applying
it in the sense that, for all the public acts of the king, a minister must be
responsible. As this responsibility could be enforced only by impeach-
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ment in parliament, the Whigs, from the start, maintained that parliament
must be kept in regular session. They were therefore the party of Pro-
testantism, parliamentary government and ministerial responsibility. In
contrast, the Tories, who derived their strength mainly from the lower
clergy and the squires, were insistent on unqualified submission to the
personal prerogative. They were devoted to the Church of England; but
here there was a complication, for the high-church party, in their detesta-
tion of Protestant Dissent, were reputed to be more sympathetic to
Catholicism than to Protestantism, and many Anglican divines repudiated
any connection with the churches of the Reformation. All that could be
said with certainty was that Charles II based his power on the support of
bishops and clergy, a support which was strengthened in proportion as
the Dissenters were penalised.
It was natural that these two nicknames were rejected by many to whom
they were applied; nor did there exist in either House of Parliament a
definite party to which either label could be affixed, because politicians
were not thinking in terms of party affiliation, and governments continued
to be ‘bottomed’ not on party doctrine, but on groupings of families,
interests and clans. Nor was there any distinction in regard to personal
probity, for all parties, whatever their name, included some who were
infamous and many who were corrupt. But this does not mean that the
distinction between Whig and Tory was non-existent. By the nation out-
side Westminster, a simple, radical dualism was eagerly accepted, if only
because so many people think in terms of two sides of a game; and in
England two-sided games have always been more popular than anywhere
else. Hence the first exponents of party distinction were the great un-
enfranchised and unwashed. The distinction could be pushed into so
many recesses of life. Drinks, oaths, colours, patron saints, racecourses,
watering places and coffee houses were all lined up on either side of the
battle front, each of them, in the opinion of the other, led by a super-
human power : one side marshalled by the Devil who, as he was the first
critic, was obviously the first Whig; the other having for its generalissimo
the Whore of Rome, flaunting her scarlet finery in the face of ‘true blue’
Whigs, the whole providing a simple pattern, in bright colours, which even
the meanest could understand. For a turbulent, adolescent people all this
was a godsend, since everyone could take sides. Moreover, a safety valve
was provided by the numerous racecourses, where superfluous enthusiasm
could be dispersed over a wider range of contestants. English party
politics first found expression, not in the polite platitudes of academic
debate, nor in the calculations of parliamentary management, but in the
scurrilities of the gutter and the scaffold; in this way Englishmen became
politically-minded long before they acquired the vote.
Meanwhile the Popish Plot served to force on parliament a clear-cut
question — should James, Duke of York, be excluded from the succession?
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If he were excluded, who was to succeed? His eldest daughter, Mary
(married to William of Orange)? Or Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke
of Monmouth, who, if he succeeded, might rule by ‘a limited command ’?
But these questions did not have to be answered in Charles’s reign,
because, mainly owing to the eloquence of Halifax, the elder statesman of
the age, the Lords rejected the Exclusion Bill sent up by the Commons in
November 1680. This saved the throne for James. The dissolution of the
short-lived Oxford Parliament on 18 March 1681 marked the end of
parliamentary government as far as Charles was concerned; at the same
time, the renewal of the French subsidy provided some guarantee that
English policy would be subordinated to the behests of Versailles. Now
that parliament, exclusion and plot were out of the way, James came for-
ward as the mentor and coadjutor of his brother, and in this sense James’s
reign began four years before his accession. The so-called Rye House
Plot of 1683 provided a welcome opportunity or pretext for turning the
tables on the Whigs; and, with the help of judge Jeffreys, it proved easy to
obtain convictions for high treason against prominent opponents of the
court. In this way Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney were dis-
posed of, and Jack Ketch the executioner was kept busy with the dispatch
of humbler Whigs to another world. Shaftesbury, with many others, went
into exile. Titus Oates went to prison, not for perjury, but from inability
to pay the fine of £100,000 imposed on him for slandering the Duke of
York.
For both Charles and James this was a period of revenge. A start was
made with the parliamentary boroughs, many of which had returned to
the Commons critics and even enemies of the court. Accordingly, their
charters were subjected to Quo Warrantor, and nearly all of them were
remodelled in order to ensure the admission of only Anglicans and
loyalists. In this way the walls of the corporations, including those of the
city of London, fell before Jeffreys like the walls of Jericho. With these
changes it was hoped that, if a parliament did have to be summoned, only
the ‘right’ burgesses would be sent to Westminster; so, too, the sheriffs of
the remodelled corporations could be trusted to summon the ‘right’ jury-
men, who would give the verdict expected of them in cases where the
Crown was concerned. Such at least was the theory behind this drive
against the corporations. At the same time, the enforcement of the penal
laws against Protestant Dissenters was intensified, and in one case 1 only
the courageous conduct of the local authorities prevented the use of
dragoons for the purpose of harrying the countryside. In Scotland, less
fortunate, there was nothing to come between the populace and the
executive; accordingly, in Presbyterian Scotland as in Huguenot France
1 That of Shropshire. The evidence will be found in the Domestic State Papers of the
reign, no. 29, bundle 438, letters of Charles Holt and other justices to Sunderland, 8 and
15 December 1684.
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this was the ‘killing time’, and men condemned at two o’clock were
hanged at five.
Charles II died on 16 February 1685 in his fifty-fifth year. His last
years, which showed some decline in health and character, were, for him, a
period of tranquillity and, for his country, a period of uneasy peace, to
which his brother and the executioner contributed. ‘Rien n’avance les
choses comme les executions’; politically, England was reduced to the
state of France and Scotland ; only Ireland was unchanged. For however
short a time, the British Isles were units in a system which aligned them
with the respectable, ‘well-conditioned’ States of the Continent. Of that
system, the most moderate and reasonable exponent was the great French
bishop J.-B. Bossuet. In his funeral oration on the death of Henrietta
Maria (1669), the mother of Charles and James, the bishop maintained
that, for some years, England had been plagued by a disrespect for
authority and a continual itch for change. This ‘intemperance of mad
curiosity’ had arisen from the rejection of the Catholic faith, which alone
‘has a certain weight capable of keeping people in their place’. God
punishes nations which depart from the true faith. Henrietta Maria,
according to Bossuet, had been convinced that only by the restoration of
Catholicism would order in England be restored, and already her elder
son had found his best servants among Catholics. Charles I’s fault was
neither his obstinacy nor his perfidy, as his opponents maintained, but
his clemency. 1 Such were the principles, suggested with a delicacy and
restraint, in accord with the solemn occasion on which they were pro-
nounced, of that religious-political system in which the last male Stuarts
implicitly believed. Charles had had to bide his time before acting on
them; James was acting on them before his reign began. Nor was the
system one that could be modified by experience, or even by defeat and
disaster, for it had the cast-iron rigidity of theological dogma: a fact well
illustrated by James himself when, in his exile, he regretted most of all
that he had been too lenient. It is open to everyone to have his own views
about the merits of such a system, by whatever name it may be called ; but
of its existence and its implications there can be no doubt.
Bossuet was right in thinking that the English were a turbulent people;
but he knew nothing of the conditions which helped to control that turbu-
lence, and even to give it some sense of direction, for his experience was
only of France, a ‘normal’ country, in contrast with the abnormality of
England. That abnormality was expressed in so many forms that most
foreign observers were agreed that Englishmen were mad, the conclusive
proof being that so many of them performed public services without pay-
ment. England was abnormal in her law and in her central and local
government. The criminal law was nearly as harsh as that of continental
States, for it was still held that the main purpose of law is to protect, not
1 J.-B. Bossuet, Oraison Funibre de Henriette de Franc*.
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the person, but his property. On the other hand, from Berwick-on-Tweed
to Land’s Encj the law was uniform, whereas in France there was a
general distinction between the area of written law and that of customary
law, the latter including about three hundred districts where different rules
were enforced. Moreover, the jury system was characteristic of English
procedure, and in 1670, by Bushell’s case, there was vindicated for the first
time the principle of the inviolability of the jury for its verdict. In addition
to the petty jury which, as a result of this case, acquired some indepen-
dence, there was also the grand jury, a body of substantial freeholders,
which could not easily be intimidated. This body conducted a preliminary
inquiry in order to determine whether or not a case should go for trial,
and in this way provided some protection for the subject against the
executive wherever it resorted to the law courts in order to penalise a
critic or dissentient. A signal example was provided in November 1 681
when the Crown tried to dispose of Shaftesbury by a trumped-up charge
of high treason. The grand jury of Middlesex, composed of Whigs, threw
out the Bill, on the ground that no reliable evidence of treason had been
adduced, a signal defeat for Charles and his government. But the lesson
was not lost on them; for, by the remodelling of the boroughs, they hoped
to ensure that only Tory grand juries would be returned.
The Restoration had followed a period of Puritan experiments in law
reform, experiments which were not brought to fruition until the time of
Bentham; but meanwhile the reign of Charles II was notable for many
additions to the statute-book. Among these was a Statute of Limitations
passed in 1666. All wars create situations in which it may be impossible to
determine whether a man is dead or alive, a doubt which may seriously
prejudice wives and heirs; accordingly, this Act, passed in the second
Anglo-Dutch War, imposed an arbitrary but not unreasonable time limit,
seven years of absence abroad, without evidence of existence, after which
death might be presumed. Shaftesbury’s ‘Act for the better securing the
liberty of the subject and for prevention of imprisonments beyond the
seas’ is more widely known as the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act, and
even as the Habeas Corpus Act. It was legalised by Charles in May 1679.
The writ of habeas corpus was an ancient remedy for ensuring the pro-
duction, before a court, of a detained person, in order that the causes of
his detention might be publicly investigated; but, in practice, there were
many ways in which the executive could interfere. Thus a procedure had
developed whereby the writ was issued only by a judge of King’s Bench,
and only in term time. It might have to be applied for several times; and,
even when granted, there might be long delays in serving it, as where the
prisoner was confined overseas, for example, in Jersey. Shaftesbury’s Act,
which originated from earlier measures intended to prevent imprisonment
overseas, remedied these defects and provided the basis for the modern
application of this remedy : a remedy which, it may be claimed, is distinctive
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of the jurisprudence of English-speaking peoples, as contrasted with those
systems where a political suspect can be imprisoned secretly and indefi-
nitely. When James II announced that he wished to see the abrogation of
the Test Act he added the Habeas Corpus Act.
These achievements would hardly have been possible but for the fact
that the old common law of England — however much it may have been
misinterpreted by Coke and other jurists — was held to provide rights and
remedies for the subject against encroachment by the executive: rights
and remedies, not of recent acquisition, but of (supposed) immemorial
antiquity, unparalleled in the laws of other countries, including those of
England’s nearest neighbour, Scotland. Of these the High Court of
Parliament was the ancient and revered custodian, a supreme tribunal and
grand inquest of the nation, of which the king was an essential element, in
contrast with the Parlement de Paris which was subject to the personal
control of the Crown. The part played at this time by the Commons in
parliament has not yet been fully elucidated by modem historians : can it
be wondered at that it completely baffled contemporary foreign observers?
It is true that most of the Commons were willing to accept bribes, whether
from Danby, Louis XIV or anyone else; for private corruption is not
always incompatible with public profession of high principle. But, in
their corporate capacity, the Commons derived strength from their claim
to speak on behalf of all the freeholders of England. Individually, only a
minority were of distinctive personal interest; collectively, they had a
prestige, at home and abroad, unparalleled by any other representative
body in the world. These Englishmen could be bribed, but not bullied;
Charles knew this, James did not. Moreover, they were representative,
not in the modem sense that they had a mandate from tens of thousands
of electors, but in the sense that, by their inclusion of squires, younger
sons of peers, officials of the administration, army and navy officers,
merchants and lawyers, they represented the classes which were pre-
dominant in the State.
Lastly, most remarkable of all was the English local administration. A
great hierarchy of officials, exalted and humble, secular and ecclesiastical,
co-operated in the task of keeping boisterous Englishmen in their place.
They were headed by the lords lieutenant of the counties who, with the
help of their deputies, supervised the militia; and, in what were like local
parliaments, assessed property owners for their contribution to the sup-
port of this home defence force. At times these officials interfered with
the course of elections; they also provided a channel by which the privy
council was kept in touch with local feeling, and through which pressure
could be exercised from the centre. In practice, the lords lieutenant were
drawn from the nobility and the more important families of the gentry;
and a king who was sure of these men was sure of the nation: hence the
unwisdom of James II in depriving the majority of them of their offices.
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Next in dignity came the sheriffs and the justices of the peace. The sheriff
was responsible for the county gaol and officiated at executions; usually
he held office for one year, and his office was considered both onerous and
expensive. More numerous were the justices, who performed by far the
greater part of the administrative and judicial work of the county.
In exercising their various duties they acted singly, or in twos, or in
quarter sessions, when all the justices of the county met together, to deal
with the innumerable tasks imposed on them by statute, be it the licensing
of ale houses, making affiliation orders, or sentencing recusants to fine or
imprisonment. All of them freeholders and Anglicans, the justices usually
had no more knowledge of the law than what could be picked up from
such standard manuals as Dalton’s The Country Justice. Many of them
were oppressive and intolerant; but they were the unpaid enforcers of a
system which was directed mainly to the maintenance of law and order in
a high-spirited population.
Nor were these the only officials of the administrative system. The
Church still exercised some disciplinary control over the laymen, usually
in the diocesan courts of the bishop. For the villagers, there were the
visitations of the archdeacon, when the scolds, the unmarried mothers, the
sabbath breakers and, in general, the never-do-wells of the parish were
disciplined by fine, penance or excommunication. Nobody was too
humble for the attentions of this ecclesiastical mandarin. Moreover, it is
not always realised that in many areas the old manorial jurisdiction, how-
ever attenuated, still survived, usually where there were copyholders, who
were obliged to attend the customary courts held by the steward on behalf
of the manorial lord: courts where the ‘homage’ or jury of copyholders
might have to determine on a great variety of offences and infringements
connected mainly with the cultivation of the soil. The countryside was
subjected to supervision and control, not by appointees of the central
government, nor by dragoons pursuing unarmed villagers, but by civilian
residents, many of them poor and obscure, all of them habituated to that
co-operation and public service which are among the essentials of self-
government. Here was a closely knit, well-ordered world, as remote from
the debauchery of Whitehall as from the subservience of Versailles. It was
this dour, impenetrable world which James II, to his cost, attempted to
overturn. Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV could have imagined that
Protestant England possessed in her local administration a system which
effectively secured order by popular participation in a host of local
offices, the great majority of them unpaid.
Such, in brief, were the royal policy and the central and local institutions
of England in this period. From that policy the nation derived one great
advantage — freedom from campaigns on the Continent, a freedom which
enabled her to conserve resources and build up the wealth which served
her afterwards in the long struggle with France. From her institutions she
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
derived a spirit of enterprise which enabled her to take a prominent place
among the nations. Of this increasingly prosperous and enlightened
England London was the microcosm. But here a distinction is necessary.
Today the two cities of London and Westminster are regarded as scarcely
distinguishable, though they are still under separate administrations;
historically, however, they are distinct and can even be contrasted. West-
minster, with its abbey, its great royal hall and its two Houses of Parlia-
ment, was the embodiment, in Gothic architecture, of the alliance between
Church, Crown, Legislature and Law, the four pillars of national history.
London, on the other hand, with its docks, markets, shops and a popula-
tion of about half a million, was a great trading metropolis, a closely knit
civic community and the social centre of the realm. That these two centres
were, for so many centuries, separate and distinct is of historical interest,
for both parliament and' the law courts developed in surroundings of
sanctity and majesty, in contrast with the bustling, secular activity of the
London streets. In consequence, English parliamentary procedure and
judicial process have retained a dignity and high sense of tradition without
parallel in other lands. Nor was there merely contrast between the two;
there was also interaction. From the time of Elizabeth I it had become
the practice for groups of members of the House of Commons, overawed
perhaps by the solemn restraint of St Stephen’s Chapel, to resort to
London taverns, in order to discuss joint action, afterwards put into effect
in the House, a practice of great importance in the history of parliament.
Moreover, these opportunities for social concourse and discussion
helped, as it were, to ‘cushion’ the impacts of political disagreement and
to provide a broader basis for political life. London and Westminster, so
far from being identical, were contrasted with and complementary to each
other.
Of this fact the London coffee-houses provided a clear example. In
Charles’s reign they were becoming an important institution, and the
government became apprehensive that they were a source of sedition; for
newspapers, many of them suspect, could be read by their patrons, and
there was no saying what plots might be hatched in such free and semi-
secret intercourse of men who were presumably idle. Accordingly, several
attempts were made to suppress them, but these were not persevered in,
and indeed they provided useful places of resort for government spies. It
was by the evidence of one of these that Titus Oates was convicted, not of
perjury, but of slandering the Duke of York. On the other hand, several
contemporaries praised the coffee-houses because they helped to make
people sociable; the conversation often supplemented the information
conveyed in books, and it was even suggested that, as educational institu-
tions, they played the part of popular universities. Inevitably, there was
some specialisation as men of similar opinions forgathered in the same
place. Kid’s Coffee House was favoured by Titus Oates and the Whigs,
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Gray’s Inn Coffee House by the Tories. Others had literary associations:
for example, Wills’ where Dryden presided. So too with clubs, of which
the Green Ribbon was the most famous, frequented by supporters of
Shaftesbury at the time of the Exclusion controversy.
The freemen of London had special privileges not shared by other
cities. The chief magistrate, the lord mayor, had a place of unique dignity
and power; the corporation over which he presided included the greatest
commercial magnates of the realm; and there were occasions, as at the
Restoration and the Revolution, when the city in its corporate capacity
acted almost as an Estate of the realm. Moreover, its finances were so well
managed that, before the changes of William’s reign, the Chamber of
London was considered to provide better security for investment than any
government institution. In their wealth and mode of life the merchants
rivalled the patricians of Venice and Amsterdam in their prime, and they
mingled with professional men, such as lawyers and doctors, as well as
with a host of brokers, insurance agents and middle-men, whose numbers
were increasing so rapidly as to cause disquiet. Already London was
becoming established as the world centre of marine and fire insurance;
Lloyd’s began in a coffee-house in Charles’s reign; fire insurance com-
menced in 1680. There was no university; but the Inns of Court, where a
collegiate mode of life was practised, provided what was claimed to be a
third university, and so one more element was added to the numerous and
contrasted components of the city’s inhabitants. Another class— the
nobility — was now taking up semi-permanent residence in the capital.
Already, some of the bishops had town houses ; with the development of
the west end and the district of St James’s, many members of the peerage
spent a large part of their time in London, an innovation condemned by
those holding older views about the function of the nobility. Generally,
the governments of this period regarded the great expansion of London,
not with pride, but with apprehension, since so many of the inhabitants
were considered Whigs or Dissenters, and there were innumerable
opportunities for plotting.
This increase in the population and importance of the city is partly
explained by the fact that, after the rebuilding which followed the Great
Fire of 1666, London was a much more pleasant place in which to live.
The rebuilding was carried out on a definite plan enacted by statute;
streets, lanes and houses were classified according to size and importance;
the height of buildings and the materials to be used in their construction
were prescribed. At the same time improvements were effected in street
lighting and water supply. The result was that medieval London, with its
narrow lanes and wooden houses, was swept away, and its place was
taken by an array of streets, squares and buildings which, even today, can
be described as comparatively spacious and substantial. St Paul’s was
still in process of rebuilding, and Wren was busy with those churches and
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halls which, before the second World War, stood out as jewels in a sea of
masonry. With good reason, Englishmen must have felt pride as their
renovated capital slowly took shape. England did not yet hold a com-
manding place in Europe, but the bases of power were there — the natural
resources, the highly skilled labour, the well-built, well-manned ships, and
a metropolis which might have rivalled Carthage in its commerce and
Paris in its amenity.
The natural resources can be illustrated by a reference to the land.
There was, first of all, the reclamation of marsh, as in the Fen district, an
enterprise which had begun in the reign of Charles l and was resumed in
1663; the land thus reclaimed was particularly fertile and was at first
devoted to the raising of vegetable oils. A similar improvement was that
of enclosing which, at this time, was not necessarily for the conversion of
arable to pasture, but often for the more profitable use of the soil : hence
the frequency of enclosing round large towns or in mining districts.
Chancery sanctioned several enclosures of this kind, insisting only on the
consent of all the freeholders concerned, but there was no legislation
which specifically encouraged landlords to enclose. Nevertheless, the
‘improving’ landlord was coming into existence and, in general, there was
a more widespread interest in the potentialities of the soil. The cultivation
of new crops, such as clover, lucerne and turnip, was suggested by at least
one writer, and increased use was made of the potato. The best evidence
of this more enterprising spirit in agriculture is seen in the investigations
commenced by the Royal Society in 1664. In that year a ‘Georgicall
Committee’ was appointed, a fact-finding committee which sent out
questionnaires to prominent agriculturalists asking for information about
types of soil, manures, farm implements, and the general level of cultiva-
tion in their districts. The replies showed that the level was fairly high,
and that, especially in the sowing of the new grasses, much of the initiative
of eighteenth-century farming was anticipated in the seventeenth.
The steadily increasing demand for corn benefited the landlord ; indeed,
it was in Charles’s reign that the com laws were inaugurated by an Act of
1673 which established a system of bounties, whereby an export trade in
com was started. A certain measure of stabilisation was thus created which
made it worth while to grow com, and so more land was brought under
cultivation. Another development may be found in fruit growing. For
long, the apple, basis of the extensive cider production, had been the most
popular of English fruits. But, owing mainly to French influence, its
monopoly was now threatened by the melon, pear, peach and nectarine;
sheltered gardens in the south were decorated by these exotics, while the
hardier fruits were grown in extensive orchards in Kent and in the Severn
valley, thus adding to the variety so characteristic of the English country-
side. This was enhanced by afforestation, encouraged by the demand for
timber, and Evelyn’s Sylva was found alongside Dalton’s Country Justice
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in the thinly populated libraries of the squires. Their wealthier neighbours
were becoming interested in landscape gardening, as evidenced in the
layout of such new or rebuilt country houses as Euston (Lord Arlington),
Althorp (Lord Sunderland) and Cliveden (Duke of Buckingham). But
it is notable that these developments were to be found mainly in the
midlands and the south, for the north was still poor, underpopulated and
even unexplored, still devoid of those amenities which elsewhere were
becoming such a distinctive feature of English life. On the Scottish border
life and property were precarious; and the gaol at Carlisle was usually
filled with northern cattle raiders, most of whom took the ‘high road’ 1
back to their native land.
Restoration England was still primarily an agricultural and pastoral
country, its villages mostly given over to domestic industries. Throughout
the country there were scattered areas which might be described as
industrial, in the limited sense that their occupants were not dependent for
a livelihood only on corn or wool, but might be engaged, in whole or in
part, in some craft or industry. Thus there was considerable mining and
metal-working, often located in districts other than the industrial areas of
today — for example, the metal-working in the Forest of Dean and in the
Wealden district of Kent and Sussex. Lead was still extracted in the mines
of the Peak district in Derbyshire — later, lead became an important article
of export. In contrast, tin-mining in Cornwall was a decaying enterprise,
for the metal could be obtained more cheaply elsewhere. Copper, mined
at Keswick and in Staffordshire, was coming into wider use and was the
basis of a brass industry which had foundries in the Isleworth and Rother-
hithe districts of London. Birmingham and Sheffield were already centres
of metal industries, the one noted for its nails, guns and hardware, the
other for its knives and cutlery.
Salt was relatively important. It was obtained from brine pits in
Staffordshire and Worcestershire; after 1671 the rock salt of Cheshire was
utilised, and on the north-eastern coast there were salt-pans where water
was evaporated with the help of coal from the pits of Durham and
Northumberland. Deposits of coal in the midlands helped to promote
the metal-working of the Birmingham area ; but the main sources of supply
were the shallow pits of Durham and the western part of Cumberland,
much of the product of the first source being conveyed by ship from
Newcastle to London and up the Thames. Nevertheless, coal had by no
means displaced wood or charcoal for smelting and heating, and so one
cannot reasonably speak of an ‘industrial revolution’ in this period.
Moreover, the steam-engine at this time was still a primitive device used
mainly for pumping water out of pits, and industry continued to be
dependent on water power. Transportation had developed little from its
condition a century before because it was still dependent on river and
1 That is, by the gallows.
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coasting vessels, or on roads which were often little better than tracks. There
was much improvement in rivers to make them more navigable; but not
till nearly a century later were either industry or transport revolutionised.
The textiles were specially important. Manchester, an ‘open’ town like
Birmingham, that is, free from the restrictions imposed in ‘close’ or
corporate towns, was the centre of a cotton industry, dependent on an
inferior variety of wool imported from the eastern Mediterranean. Cotton
goods provided a valuable alternative to cloth, as they were more easily
washable, and so more hygienic. But cloth-making was still the basic
English industry. Its processes provided for the co-operation of all the
members of the family; its products were the basis of the export trade;
its regulation was the subject of statutes, passed in almost every year of
the century. It was the belief of English statesmen that nature had con-
ferred special advantages on England, most clearly evidenced in the great
variety of wool to be found from one parish to another, a variety attri-
buted to the great differences of rainfall and soil within the British Isles.
Even in fuller’s earth, obtained from pits in Surrey and used for removing
oil from the finished cloth, it was thought that England had a monopoly,
for it appears that this absorbent clay was not yet mined on the Continent.
English cloth was usually made from the blending of wools from different
areas ; in this industry, it was variety as much as quality that was aimed at,
each district specialising in the production of a fabric intended for a
specific purpose or market. There was a similar variety in the degree to
which capitalism had invaded the industry — it was making its appearance
in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where small capitalists ‘put out’ the
wool to cottage workers; it had progressed farther in the cloth towns of
Wiltshire and the south-west, where there was large-scale production and
more division of labour.
Much of the economic development of England was due to the dove-
tailing of industries at home with markets abroad. The link between the
two was the ship and the seaman. The system was frankly based on
exploitation of labour — of the ‘poor’ at home and of the negro in the
West Indies— both pre-ordained by providence to their subordinate place
in the scheme of things. Nor was there any conflict of interests, for the
landlords were convinced that an expanding overseas trade was the best
security for their own prosperity; and, unlike the French, they had no
objection to putting their sons into trade, provided it was wholesale or
overseas trade. For English products there must always be a sufficient
‘vent’; only thus could bankruptcy be avoided. In addition to the private
merchants, the great trading companies, such as the East India, the
Levant and the Royal African Companies , 1 were providing such ‘vents’
in joint enterprises which, after the short period of relaxation in the later
years of the Interregnum, were characterised by varying degrees of
1 For the East India Company, see below, ch. xvn, pp. 417 ff.
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monopoly. These three companies which, between them, covered a great
proportion of the world’s navigable waters, were alike in this that a major
part of their exports consisted of cloth : cloth of innumerable varieties and
textures, adapted to the different climates of foreign countries and to the
needs of their markets. In order to ensure this variety each of these
companies was accustomed to draw its supplies from groups of English
counties, which were thus linked directly with an overseas market. But
the system was precarious. The companies had to face fierce competition,
notably from the French and Dutch. Changes of fashion influenced
demand, and there were great fluctuations in the amount of English cloth
which exporters could absorb, with the result that there might be pro-
longed unemployment in a district depending mainly on one or other of
the companies. This precariousness may account for the fact that there is
scarcely a year in the seventeenth century in which there was no complaint
of the decay of the cloth trade — indeed, the workers were usually poised
on the subsistence level — and this helps to explain England’s adoption of
an alternative, as evidenced by the Navigation Acts: encouragement of
imports of raw materials from the southern plantations in America and
from the West Indies, mainly for re-export.
The government was alive to this situation. Numerous committees of
the privy council consulted with economic experts and merchants; legisla-
tion was drafted usually after consultation with the various interests
involved. The Restoration period coincided with the beginning of some
kind of imperial consciousness. WAile the Cromwellian Navigation Act
had been intended mainly to limit Dutch penetration, the Act of 1660 was
more constructive in character, since it imposed an oath on all the colonial
governors and enumerated those raw materials, such as sugar, tobacco
and cotton, which must be landed in England, mainly for re-export to
other countries. English policy was thus a maritime policy, designed to
ensure freights, to promote the building of large ships, to create opportu-
nities for training in seamanship and, generally, to limit imports as much
as possible to raw materials or ‘unfinished’ goods, in exchange for
manufactured goods, notably cloth, leather goods, hardware, including
clocks and watches, together with variable amounts of corn, fish, tin, lead
and coal. Each part of the empire had its allotted place in this scheme of
things. Virginia and Maryland received English manufactures in return
for their tobacco. 1 The fishing fleets of Devon took cod-fish from New-
foundland to Spanish and Portuguese ports where they traded it for wine
and oil. The slave ships carried negroes to the West Indies and returned
with sugar which was exchanged in the London docks for manufactured
goods intended for the West African market. The Levant and East India
Companies, in return for cloth, imported silk, calicoes, muslins, fancy
goods, porcelain and tea. 2 Scotland was debarred from trade with the
1 See below, ch. xiv, pp. 348-9. 2 See below, ch. xvii, pp. 399-401, 409-10.
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plantations, but Scotsmen were allowed to settle there, and a trade grew
up in provisions between Scottish ports and the West Indies ; moreover,
the Scottish sugar refiners were allowed to import their raw material
direct. Ireland was unfairly treated. By the Navigation Act of 1670-1
the ‘enumerated’ goods from the plantations could no longer be landed
in Irish ports; and as the import of Irish cattle was supposed to prejudice
English rents, this trade was prohibited by an Act of 1666-7. A similar
restriction applied to wool and doth, but large quantities of wool were
smuggled to foreign countries, and the Irish economy was helped by a
regular export trade in horses and provisions.
England’s withdrawal from the third Anglo-Dutch War in February
1674 enabled English traders to seize several Dutch markets; and as
Charles resisted the public demand that he should go to war with Louis,
he indirectly benefited the cause of English overseas trade. The continu-
ance of this policy of peace with France under his successor helps to
account for the steady increase of English wealth and prosperity, derived
mainly from overseas and re-export trade, in the years 1675-88. Although
not yet a great European power, England was accumulating the resources
which eventually enabled her to maintain her own in the long struggle with
France and even to surpass the enemy, mainly because of her sea-power
and a comparatively modern system of public finance. Yet by 1689, when
the testing time began, English taxation tapped only a fraction of the
available wealth of the country. Reference has already been made to the
taxes which constituted the hereditary revenue of the Crown, granted to
Charles and James in 1660 and 1685 respectively. Parliament also
granted taxes from time to time, usually for specific purposes, such as the
building of ships, or for war; of these, the most important was a levy, at
first called an Assessment, falling nominally on property, but actually
levied almost entirely on land. This was usually at a definite rate, such as
two or four shillings on the pound rent, and it was estimated that a shilling
rate produced about half a million pounds annually. This, as standardised
in the reign of Anne, was called the land-tax, and became a permanent
part of the fiscal system, because of the cost of the wars with France.
With customs and excise, the land-tax was the most important tax of this
period. There were many other taxes, such as the poll-tax, the hearth-tax,
and special taxes on imports, such as wine; but the three main taxes
continued to provide the bulk of the revenue in steadily increasing volume.
Most of the taxes were farmed — that is, their proceeds were mortgaged
in advance to financiers and syndicates who made a bargain with the
Treasury as to the initial advance of a lump sum and the payment of a rent
for a term of years. In this way the government received large sums of
ready money at once, but on expensive terms, since it was obviously in the
interests of the farmers to make as much profit as possible in normal times,
and to demand large ‘defalcations’ of die rent in abnormal times, as in
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periods of plague, or war, or alleged slackness of trade. The farmers
recouped themselves by collecting the tax assigned to them, at a time when
the State did not have the trained personnel for this purpose, and from
the profits of old farms they were able to finance new ones. In these
circumstances, the best that could be done by the Treasury was to make
as good a bargain as possible with the farmers and to resist the demands
for ‘defalcations’. This was the policy pursued with much success by
Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, who was lord high treasurer from 1673
to 1678. By prudent management he succeeded in diminishing the debts
which threatened to overwhelm the administration, and this enabled him
to conduct an organised system of bribing members of the House of
Commons as a counter-campaign to the largesse bestowed by the French
ambassador. Thus Danby rendered great service to Charles; later he was
to prove one of the most effective opponents of James.
Charles’s monetary difficulties derived from the fact that he was at the
mercy both of female harpies and of an obsolescent system which had to
meet the requirements of a comparatively modem State. The sources of
national revenue were still kept in water-tight compartments, and each of
these was saddled with an item of debt or payment. If the source failed, in
whole or in part, then the payment failed in the same proportion; nor
could a deficiency in one fund be jnade good from an excess in another.
Not yet was there any consolidation of funds. This fact, more than dis-
honesty or negligence, accounts for much of the financial irregularity of
the time. For example, a courtier or influential person whose pension
failed because of deficiency in the fund supplying it would naturally beg
the king to order the Treasury to transfer his pension to a better source.
This ‘switch’ could be effected only by another ‘switch’ — transferring a
debt or payment already based on a good fund to the insecurity of the bad
one, a process by which the small men invariably were the sufferers. Such
methods of accountancy, rather than actual dishonesty, help to explain why
the humble and uninfluential — notably the sailors and their families — were
unmercifully victimised; here indeed is the dark side of the Stuart medal.
It has been said that England advanced while the Stuarts stood still.
The main interest of the reign of Charles II is the steadily increasing con-
trast between a system of personal rule based on unchangeable principles
and a nation undergoing a remarkable development in every sphere of its
life. We are too apt to assume that the career of the most popular of
Stuart kings was identical with the best interests of the country; often
these two things were in sharpest contrast. Experiment and experience in
the organisation of industry, in the direction of overseas trade, in parlia-
mentary government, in public finance, and in the highest spheres of
intellectual achievement — all these helped to create an England well able
to survive her last Stuart kings and to emerge eventually as the Great
Britain of later times.
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CHAPTER XIV
EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA
T he domestic history of the restored Stuarts cannot be understood
without an appreciation of the influence of the French and of the
Dutch on English politics. This was equally true of the colonies in
North America. There the French colony of Canada, if thinly peopled, was
firmly established and vigorous. Indian alliances, the necessities of the
fur trade, and the adventurous characters of the French missionaries and
fur-traders, led the French towards expansion inland, while the character
of the English settlers, their social and economic pattern, and the position
of their colonies near open navigable water emphasised their tendency to
settle in rigid communities. The English looked towards the Atlantic for
trade and supplies, and when they spread inland it was a slow but posses-
sive movement, taking Indian lands for settlement where the French were
content to explore, to trade and to intermingle.
By comparison with the Canadian population of about 2000 in 1660,
the English colonies were strong and populous. The New England group
(Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Haven,
Maine and New Hampshire) had reached a population of about 20,800
by 1640, and the southern (Chesapeake) colonies of Virginia and Mary-
land about 17,300, while the British West Indies already had a total of
about 38,000. But there were serious differences between the New
England colonies, there was little in common between the New England
colonies and the southern plantations, and even the English position on
the coast was broken by the French colony of Acadia and by the Dutch
colony of New Netherland, commanding the fine harbour of New
Amsterdam. The alien shipping thus made available to the English
colonists enabled them the more easily to trade as they wished, regardless
of English laws, and in colonial affairs the main interest of the Restoration
period lies in the efforts of the English government to reduce to conformity
the North American colonies, with the French and the Dutch on their
flanks.
The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy brought continuity rather than
a breach in policy, for the Commonwealth and Protectorate governments
had not only vindicated their statehood in Europe, but had asserted them-
selves on the high seas and overseas. The English colonists had tried to use
the Civil War as an opportunity to assert a measure of independence, and
the Commonwealth had tolerated many pretensions so long as loyalty to
the Stuarts was not involved. But this did not imply indifference; as soon
as the turmoil of the king’s execution was over the colonies had been
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entrusted to the administrative care of the Council of State, and later of a
series of special committees. There had been behind all this a feeling for
the development of the coherence and balance of the empire and for
integrating the economic, colonial and military aspects of such an empire
as might be created.
It had been the Dutch rather than the English who broke the back of
Iberian sea-power in the first half of the seventeenth century, and it was
almost inevitable that it should be the Dutch who seized the colonial
wealth which that Iberian sea-power controlled. The Dutch West India
Company, however, failed to make Brazil into a Dutch colony; in 1654
the last outpost at Recife was subdued and the Dutch possessions in
Brazil were surrendered. 1 This did not mean the end of the Dutch West
India Company, for the West Indian islands had become more important
than the mainland, and it was recognised that the English and French
West Indian possessions were economically dependent on the Dutch.
Amsterdam was the great sugar-refining centre as well as the great fur-
mart of Europe; but despite its importance for the trade of the North
American continent the Netherlands had not succeeded in establishing
populous or viable colonies there. Yet the Dutch position, especially in
bringing to market in Europe the products of other peoples’ colonies, was
such that the policy of France and England was framed in deliberate
opposition to Dutch claims. If England was to profit by colonies, Dutch
claims had to be rejected. Yet many Dutch practices had to be imitated —
and this also was done. The period of accomplishment, however, was
rather that of the restored Stuarts than that of the Cromwellian repub-
licans; but they had enunciated an economic thesis of interdependence
and a theory of sovereignty within which the whole might work. This was
the epoch-making declaration of the Act of 1650 that colonies ‘are and
ought to be subordinate to and dependent upon England. . .and subject
to such laws and orders as are or shall be made by the Parliament of
England’. 2
The period 1660-88 saw the adoption and adaptation of Cromwellian
ideas and practices. There was, of course, a change of personalities and of
emphasis, and the restoration period itself can be divided into two from
the point of view of colonial policy ; but throughout there was continuity
of aim. Up to about the year 1675 a joint Anglo-French policy could be
based on French approval of the Stuart monarchy and of their plans for
re-establishing the Roman Catholic Church in England ; the two countries
were allied against the Dutch, and pursued a direct anti-Dutch policy in
the Cromwellian pattern. From about 1675 onwards it became clear that
a distinction must be drawn between the Stuart monarchy and the English
people, that these would not stomach many of the French plans, however
1 For details, see below, ch. xvi, pp. 385-6, 393.
2 G. L. Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System (New York, 1908), p. 362.
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much the monarchy might accept them, and that English and French
colonial ambitions must one day confront each other. During the second
half of the period, therefore, Anglo-French rivalry replaced the alliance
against the Dutch. In both phases the English colonies, and English
policy with regard to them, occupied the centre of the scene. The English
colonies were populous, purposeful and prosperous, in a way in which the
French and Dutch colonies were not. Colonial issues were always inter-
twined with maritime power; it was the navy of Blake which challenged
the Dutch and vindicated English claims in the Caribbean, and the navy
of Samuel Pepys which assured the English position. The outstanding
position of the English colonies was further emphasised by the mood of
English governments.
This was a period of unremitting and purposeful experiment. Varying
the method and the details, the constant aim was to cast the divergent and
separatist colonial outposts in an imperial mould, to make of the many
parts a single economic and military unit. There was continuity with
Cromwellian policy, and indeed continuity of method. The Navigation
Act was re-enacted, with emphasis on shipping, and with the ‘ enumerated ’
clause to drive colonial produce — sugar, tobacco, cotton-wool, fustic and
other dyewoods — exclusively to England. And under the restored mon-
archy, as under the Commonwealth and the first Stuarts, colonial affairs
were the proper concern of the Council and its various committees rather
than of parliament — despite the declaration of parliamentary sovereignty
in the statute of 1650. Officially the privy council was responsible for
colonial matters, and a committee of that body was set up to deal with
trade and plantations. A series of other committees followed; but
Clarendon as Lord Chancellor was so preoccupied with domestic and
European affairs that colonial matters were slighted; the outstanding
feature of his regime, as far as the* colonies were concerned, was the lack
of effective governance which the multiplicity of councils and conciliar
committees brought with it.
From 1667, when Clarendon fell from power, until 1676 when James,
Duke of York, assumed effective control of colonial affairs, the reins were
in the hands of Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury. 1
During this period the concepts of an imperial policy and economy were
clearly formulated, and effective administration, not unsympathetic to
colonial ambitions and interests, seemed likely to knit together the
different elements in the empire. Shaftesbury’s experience of colonial
administration went back to the Cromwellian Council of State’s Special
Committee for Plantations; under his leadership the 1668 committee for
trade, which included James, Duke of York, and Prince Rupert, above all
tried to devise some means for enforcing the Navigation Acts. In 1669
they reported that neither the colonial governors nor the settlers were
1 For him, see above, ch. xm, pp. 306, 314-19.
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observing the Acts and advised that agents should be sent to the colonies
and naval vessels should capture ships contravening these laws. This
recommendation, however, was not enforced effectively ; although much
of the Cromwellian emphasis on West Indian trade survived, Shaftesbury
and his committees were not dogmatic on these issues except in their
anti-Dutch connotation.
Even against the Dutch, Shaftesbury was not intransigent, and his
approach to the vexed question of the Balance of Trade was marked by
breadth of view and ability to consider the long-term problems of remit-
tances and terms of trade. But if Shaftesbury and his committees for trade
and plantations were somewhat illogical and far from dogmatic in framing
and enforcing a policy to achieve a balance of trade by the full implemen-
tation of the Navigation Acts, he was firmly convinced that the interests of
merchants must be consulted but that merchants must not dictate policy.
The tone of his committees (amended to give small and effective member-
ship in 1670 and 1672) was best summarised in the order that the trade of
the plantations should be so regulated ‘that they may be more serviceable
one unto another, and as the whole unto these our kingdomes so these our
kingdomes unto them’. 1
Shaftesbury aimed at an imperial economy in which the relationships
were mutually dependent, but the aim was pursued with tolerance and a
readiness to acknowledge colonial interests and the claims of expediency.
When in 1671 the colonists of Massachusetts seemed likely to break off
their dependence, Charles II pressed for a strong tone to be taken (to
quote the diarist Evelyn, who was a member of the Council of Plantations)
‘ which those who better understood the peevish and touchy humour of that
Colony were utterly against’, and so a ‘conciliatory paper’ or ‘civil letter’
was sent. 2 As Lord Chancellor Shaftesbury inveighed against the Dutch,
aimed to seize their colonial trade, and told the Lords in February 1673
that ‘the States of Holland are England’s eternal Enemy, both by Interest
and Inclination’. 3 By November Shaftesbury, an old Commonwealth
man, was beginning to discover the secret implications of the Treaty of
Dover 4 and to revolt at the necessities of the French alliance. He became
the leader of opposition to the Roman Catholics, and even to the Dutch
War which he had so vehemently supported. His fall was much more than
a personal tragedy ; it left the way open for the dogmatic assertiveness of
James, Duke of York, and his associates in colonial matters. The Lords of
Trade, an old committee of the privy council, again emerged as a power-
ful body, intent to be ‘very strict inquisitors’ in dealing with the colonies
and to ensure the authority of the Crown. The question of sovereignty was
1 P.R.O. 30/24/49/8-11.
2 Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn Esq., F.R.S., ed. H. B. Wheatley (London,
1906), ii, 260-2.
• Journals of the House of Commons, x, 246-7.
* See above, ch. xm, p. 310.
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argued round the regulation of vital trade relationships, not round
abstract problems which might have left the colonists tolerant or indif-
ferent. A detailed questionnaire was sent out to colonial governors, and
the Customs Commissioners reported that all efforts to secure the
co-operation of colonial governors and shipmasters in enforcing the Acts
of Trade had proved entirely ineffective.
So far was the system from enforcing a trade in which England was the
centre of exchanges that predominance seemed increasingly to lie with
New England. The merchants and shipmasters of Boston, Salem and
Providence prospered by taking the foodstuffs of New England and
manufactured goods to the West Indies, where they could undersell
English merchants and could buy indigo, tobacco, and sugar for shipment
to New England or alien ports in Europe. An attempt to check the
evasions was made in 1673 by an Act for the Encouragement of Trade.
Shipmasters must give bond that they would carry the commodities which
lay at the heart of colonial trade only to British ports or to another colony;
in this case, they must pay a ‘Plantation Duty’ equivalent to the duty
payable if they brought their cargo to a British port. Collectors and sur-
veyors of the customs were appointed to act in the colonies; this intro-
duced the problems of sovereignty in a particularly difficult form since
these officers were not responsible to the local governments but to the
Crown in England.
Towards the New England States even the Lords of Trade were a little
cautious and circumspect ; they did not know how much dependence
Massachusetts and its satellites would accept. But for the West Indies,
especially Jamaica and Barbados, they thought themselves in a stronger
position. Overriding the claim that the laws of Jamaica were municipal,
they denied the right of the island’s Assembly to legislate, and reported
that the king should retain power to alter or even to revoke laws which the
Assembly passed. The Earl of Carlisle was sent out as governor in 1678,
firmly believing in active and autocratic government and intending to set
up a new and autocratic model for Jamaica without further consultation
of the Assembly. He almost inevitably provoked protests and deadlock,
and himself felt that the governor should not be tied too close to instruc-
tions issued at great distance. In Barbados also the activity of the Lords of
Trade stirred up the Assembly against alien laws, and the governor
against interference with his powers and patronage.
The Exclusion Bill controversy 1 brought Shaftesbury and the enemies
of James, Duke of York, into power for a time in 1679; but the Lords of
Trade remained substantially the same body pursuing substantially the
same purposes, with scrutinies of laws and trade practices, and with con-
stant interference in appointments. But they were at odds with the mon-
archy, irritated and ignored by the colonial governors. No solution could
1 See above, ch. xm, p. 317.
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be found, but the Jamaican Speaker, Samuel Long, declared that ‘as
Englishmen ’ the colonists 4 ought not to be bound by any laws to which
they had not given their consent’. 1 At this juncture the Lords of Trade
virtually abandoned their case: they accepted the reality of a revenue act
in Jamaica in return for continuing the former constitution, and on the
appointment of a new governor in Barbados they withdrew discreetly
from the more dogmatically authoritative innovations. But colonial laws
were to be sent home for confirmation; they were to agree ‘as far as may
be’ with the laws of England; the king retained the right of disallowing
them, and the governor the right of veto. The Lords had not changed their
principles, and while the compromise with Jamaica was implemented they
advised that a perpetual revenue Bill should be obtained, after which the
governor and his nominated officers might pay but little attention to local
opinion, and need seldom summon the Assembly.
The islands needed assurance that their revenues would be properly
spent for their own purposes; but the Lords of Trade could only emanci-
pate the governors from the assemblies if they could get for them some
recurrent income. Revenue for Barbados and the Leeward Islands was
put in the hands of commissioners in London, appointed by the Treasury ;
in Jamaica in 1683 the Assembly passed a revenue act, valid for twenty-
one years, in return for tacit admission of the claim that the laws of
England were in force there, while the demands for an annual session of
the Assembly and a veto on forced military service were dropped. Thus in
the West Indies control of revenue lay with royally nominated commis-
sioners, and the Crown’s right to confirm or reject laws passed by the
assemblies was vindicated. The political balance was still uncertain; but
at least the principles seemed to have been settled, and the Lords of Trade
had asserted the claims to sovereignty, the appointment of officials, and
the validity of the Acts of Trade upon which any idea of a co-ordinated
imperial economy must rest. The Lords of Trade, however, as Charles
turned against the Exclusionists who controlled that body, became
merely an administrative committee carrying out the commands of the
Secretary of State.
Vital as the West Indies appeared, North America was equally signifi-
cant. Here Massachusetts was most important, and here also revenue and
an appointed auditor played their part in precipitating disagreement; for
trade, and taxation upon trade, mattered more in Massachusetts than in
any other colony. By 1660 Massachusetts had a population of about
40,000 and was firmly established as a political, social, and economic
entity. The spread of the English colonies had undoubtedly denoted
internal dissensions, but also the strength and purpose of the settlers.
1 A. P. Thornton, West -India Policy under the Restoration (Oxford, 1956), p. 199 et
passim.
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Although divergence from orthodox Puritanism was a primary cause for
the establishment of the Providence Plantations on Rhode Island and of
Connecticut, Massachusetts retained predominance; this made it inevit-
able that she should aim at pre-eminence in the imperial economy
which was in process of creation. Not only were the Navigation Acts
freely broken, with European goods taken direct into the colonies, but
from the New England colonies such contraband goods went out to other
colonies, especially to the West Indian islands. To meet the bills involved
in such a system colonial produce was, despite the ‘enumerated clauses’
of the Navigation Acts, shipped direct to Europe instead of through an
English port.
When the Commonwealth gave place to the restored monarchy
Massachusetts was in a state of transition. As population increased the
Puritan oligarchy more and more became a minority, and in 1662 the
establishment was broadened by the ‘Half-Way Covenant’, by which
children of Church members might be admitted to the Church and so
might be freemen, even if they had not experienced conversion and were
not qualified as full members of the Church community. The same year
saw equally important changes in the other New England States. The
communities of Providence, Portsmouth, Newport and Warwick had been
established on the basis of separation of Church and State, and had to
fear alike the hostility of Massachusetts and of the Indian population of
Rhode Island (from which they had conscientiously purchased their lands).
In 1644 they had secured a parliamentary incorporation as the Providence
Plantations, giving them power to rule themselves, and in 1663 they vindi-
cated their separate status and their democratic regime by a royal
confirmation of the parliamentary grant.
Connecticut also showed important differences from the constitution of
Massachusetts in that the franchise for voting at elections to the General
Court was not based on religious conformity. A property qualification,
imposed in 1657 at £30 personal estate and increased in 1662 to an addi-
tional £20 in real estate, disenfranchised more than half the adult male
population. But the disqualification was not on religious grounds, and
although the governor had to be a member of an approved congregation
he was popularly elected according to the normal franchise. Government
was markedly liberal : there was none of the theocratic aristocracy which
ruled Massachusetts, and partly for this reason (but also on account of
the rich soil and the fur trade) Connecticut prospered and by 1662 had
fifteen towns and a population of about five thousand. While Massa-
chusetts looked eastwards and to the development of maritime trade,
Connecticut looked westwards and inward to the continent. When in
1663 Connecticut petitioned for a royal charter it secured not only a
generous measure of self-government but a considerable extension : all the
territory from Narragansett river to the South Sea, bounded on the north
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by Massachusetts and on the south by the sea, with the islands adjoining.
This was interpreted as conveying Long Island, and later as extending
Connecticut’s boundaries to the Pacific; and although this was premature
in 1663, the persuasiveness of Winthrop, the loyalty of Connecticut and its
purposeful policy counted for much.
Connecticut triumphed, very largely at the expense of New Haven,
which was predominantly mercantile and so in conflict economically with
Massachusetts and with the Dutch and Swedes, and which had formed its
federated government by admission of the towns of southern Connecticut
and Long Island. But this government had no sanction from royal
charter, and New Haven showed itself ‘ obstinate and pernicious in con-
tempt of his Majestie’ in harbouring two regicides who fled from England
to America in 1660. In vain did the authorities proclaim the king and
protest that they were faithful subjects; the colony was weakened by
claims of the non-freemen to the franchise and by the dispute over
boundaries with Connecticut. When the new charter gave Connecticut
legal title to the territories of New Haven there was little strength to
resist absorption : the cities which formed the federation of New Haven
one by one submitted, joining Connecticut ‘as from a necessity’.
At the Restoration it seemed that Rhode Island also might be absorbed
by her more powerful or politic neighbours, Massachusetts, Plymouth and
Connecticut, each of which claimed some of its territory. So, strongly
stressing its loyalty and its breadth of religious toleration, Rhode Island
petitioned for a charter in 1661, and although the Connecticut charter
apparently gave it the Rhode Island territories, arbitration vindicated the
claims of Rhode Island and set the boundaries between the two colonies.
Rhode Island received a royal charter in 1663 which brought coherence
and political stability.
Massachusetts, while undoubtedly superior to her neighbours in num-
bers and wealth, was not as easily able to effect a reconciliation with
monarchist England. More noticeably than the other New England
States she had ignored the Navigation Acts. Massachusetts, which had
found it profitable to ignore the Cromwellian ‘Act’ of 1651, found that
the 1660 Act required a bond and security from ships sailing to the
colonies or bringing colonial produce to Europe, and that it offered to the
governors a third of all goods confiscated for breaking its terms. Massa-
chusetts, which had managed to evade commitment to either side during
the Civil War and Commonwealth, found this impossible under the
monarchy. In 1662 she was ordered to proclaim the king in the most
solemn manner and to conform in all things; an order followed to grant
full liberty of worship to Anglicans and to grant the franchise to all
owning the necessary property, regardless of religion. This was indeed
accompanied by a confirmation of the charter, but it struck hard at the
power of Massachusetts’ Puritan oligarchy and, in the circumstances of
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1662, it held the threat that conformity in trade would be exacted. The
favour shown to Connecticut and Rhode Island affronted Massachusetts,
and the endless disputes which ensued caused concern to the royal govern-
ment. In 1664, therefore, a commission was sent out charged with the task
of inducing New England to submit to the king, settling boundary dis-
putes, healing strife in the colonies, inquiring into their laws and govern-
ments, and also of subduing the Dutch colony of New Netherland.
The commission was not particularly hostile to Massachusetts, at least
as far as its instructions went, and the commissioners made a good start
there. But by 1665 the colony was denying their right to hear appeals or
to exercise any jurisdiction, and they returned to England angry and
thwarted, to advise Charles to take a strong line. Massachusetts was
saved partly by the fear that it was on the eve of rebellion, partly by the
fall of Clarendon, and partly by its protestations of loyalty and a present
of twenty-six great masts for the navy. But it was due to the political
situation rather than to any acceptance of the colony’s protestations that
a period of quiet prosperity and content followed the stormy departure
of the commissioners; the trade of the eastern seaboard remained free
from any serious effort to enforce the Navigation Acts.
From the point of view of the Lords of Trade the serious offence of the
Dutch in New Netherland was that they controlled the fur trade of the
Iroquois confederacy and allowed English settlers to sell tobacco and to
buy European goods in defiance of the Navigation Acts. The Dutch
occupied a strategic position on the coast; their boundary with New
Haven had been fixed by treaty in 1650, but their claims extended down
the coast from Cape Cod to Delaware Bay, and they controlled the mouth
of the Hudson river, western Long Island, and the course of the Hudson
inland to their outpost at Fort Orange. But they were divided among
themselves; their chief city. New Amsterdam, had made itself independent
of the government of the island of Manhattan, and the governor, Peter
Stuyvesant, was unable to work with his fellow-Dutchmen and relied on
the English and other aliens who had been admitted as residents after
the failure to establish a Dutch-national colony. In 1663 the Council of
Plantations appointed a special committee to report on the chances of
ousting the Dutch, and early in 1664 James, Duke of York, received from
Charles £4000 to achieve the conquest and a charter granting him the
territory. Lords and Commons alike •were aflame against the Dutch; the
Commons inquired into the decay of trade and accepted the verdict of the
merchant companies that the Dutch were the source of all difficulties, and
it was claimed that it was quite impossible to enforce the Navigation Acts
in the English colonies while the Dutch controlled New Netherland.
While England sent out a commissioner, John Scott, to assert royal
authority, Connecticut laid claim to Westchester County and the Dutch
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towns on Long Island. Lacking support from Holland, Governor
Stuy vesant was prepared to accept the claims ; but Scott announced that
Long Island was about to be granted to James, and while the Dutch,
Connecticut and John Scott were engaged in negotiations which resulted
in Connecticut throwing Scott into prison, the royal grant took shape in
England. James appointed Richard Nicolls as lieutenant-governor of his
territories ; parliament agreed to support the king in a Dutch war (strongly
urged by Shaftesbury); Charles appointed his commissioners to visit
America and announced his intention of conquering New Netherland.
Only four ships were sent, but the commissioners were empowered to
demand help from the English colonists, and the fleet made Boston its
first objective. Here they got little help, for Massachusetts well knew that
her trade depended on the Dutch colony. A month spent at Boston dis-
pelled all Dutch suspicions — to the extent that Stuyvesant allowed some
ships to depart for Curasao and himself went inland to settle an Indian
rising. When the English fleet appeared off Fort Amsterdam at the end
of August Stuyvesant, desperately though he wanted to fight, was forced
to surrender; New Amsterdam passed without a shot fired into English
hands, to become New York. The Dutch were promised that they might
settle in Manhattan as freely as English subjects and that Dutch ships
might freely ply to Holland; the Navigation Acts were waived to allow
them to import from Holland the goods which the Indians had got to
expect, and which the English manufacturers could not supply. But
although New Amsterdam fell so easily, the English had to use force to
subdue the posts at Fort Orange up the Hudson river and at Fort Amstel
on Delaware Bay.
The war thus precipitated brought the English colonial frontier into
direct contact with the French, secured control of the commercial and
military centre of the Atlantic coast of North America, and brought the
New England colonies into direct contact with Virginia and Maryland.
The conquest made possible the vindication of imperial policy in a way
which could not have been contemplated while New Amsterdam was in
alien hands. It was, inevitably, a shrewd blow at the commercial inde-
pendence of Massachusetts and the Boston seafarers.
The grant to James, and the use which he made of the grant, had
further repercussions. Before the territory was captured he granted the
lands between the Hudson and the Delaware to Sir John Berkeley and
Sir George Carteret, both ardent royalists, active men, and deeply con-
cerned in the efforts to expand the English colonies. The area, named New
Jersey to commemorate the fact that Carteret had been governor of
Jersey, was held to be the best land for agriculture in the whole of the
York concession. It was sparsely settled; in the north the Dutch had
achieved trade posts on the line of the Hudson rather than effective
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agricultural colonisation; in the south scattered communities of Swedes,
Finns and Dutch were left in possession by the new regime. The pro-
prietors, royalist and pledged to imperial unity though they were, were
not illiberal. In February 1665 they issued a series of ‘concessions’
stating the terms upon which lands were to be allotted and guaranteeing
liberty of religion, property and elections.
Secure government went far towards peopling New Jersey; but the
governor of New York, Richard Nicolls, was equally liberal and anxious
to attract settlers. He made liberal grants in the northern part of what
was to become New Jersey, and thereby caused trouble between the New
Englanders who took advantage of his offer and the governor whom the
proprietors sent out, young Philip Carteret. Carteret brought with him
French-speaking emigrants from Jersey, to settle in and around Elizabeth-
town and to rouse the suspicions of the Puritanical New England
immigrants. The very liberalism with which the proprietors granted self-
government, tolerance and trial by jury led to the development of town
meetings, and efforts at reconciliation between the governor and the
Puritan immigrants (who continued to people New Jersey) failed. They
took their stand on the grants by Nicolls and on their purchases from the
Indians and denied the proprietors’ claims. There followed two years of
confusion and riots, but the proprietors stood fast though they slightly
modified the terms of the ‘concessions’, and Charles fully supported
their title derived from James, Duke of York. The grants made by Nicolls
were repudiated, and the settlers withdrew their claims.
The vindication of the proprietors was greatly helped by the fact that in
1673 twenty-three ships appeared off Staten Island and recaptured New
York. The English garrison of Fort James was but eighty men, the
governor was absent on Long Island, and the Dutch success was almost
as easily achieved as the earlier capture by the English. An oath of
allegiance to the United Provinces was exacted, an infantry soldier,
Anthony Colve, was appointed governor of New Netherland, and the
whole of Long Island was put under his jurisdiction. New Jersey was
absorbed, and it seemed likely that the third Dutch War would effectively
annul the one worth-while achievement of the second. Most settlers cheer-
fully accepted Dutch rule, which was not oppressive and exempted them
from taking arms against any expedition from England. Since residents
were in general secure in their lands and the attack by the New England
colonies hung fire, it seemed that New Netherland might settle into a
prosperous groove. It was now under the direct rule of the United
Provinces, not of the West India Company; but Holland was hard pressed
by the alliance of England and France, and in 1674 was ready to buy the
neutrality and benevolence of England: the Treaty of Westminster
restored New Netherland to English rule.
It was held that the Dutch re-conquest had extinguished the title of the
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Duke of York and all grants which flowed from it, and that the resump-
tion of English rule in 1674 was a new beginning. Thus in his instructions
to Sir Edmund Andros, whom he appointed governor of New York in
1674, James gave him rule over all lands from the east side of Delaware
Bay to the west side of the Connecticut river. This brought Andros into
conflict with the two colonies of East and West New Jersey. Carteret had
protested against the overriding of his grant ; he secured from James a title to
the eastern part of the former New Jersey, and young Philip Carteret was
sent out as governor. He proved both efficient and popular, and Andros
found it impossible to press the duke’s claims against East New Jersey ;
indeed, he found that James himself would not support him. Despite the
fact that he and Philip Carteret were personal friends, Andros carried
Carteret off to trial in New York, only to find that the jurors accepted the
claim that Carteret’s jurisdiction in East New Jersey was legal and was
derived from the king. The people of East New Jersey steadfastly rejected
the domination of New York; when the affair was carried to England
James disowned Andros, relinquished all claim to East New Jersey, and
confirmed his grant to Carteret.
Berkeley, in the meantime, had sold the claim which he derived from
James’s grant to a group of Quakers, who had taken over the settlements
on the Delaware as West New Jersey. The Quakers, however, were so
much at odds among themselves that William Penn had to be called in to
settle their disputes, and James’s unsatisfactory attitude made tenures so
uncertain that settlement in West New Jersey was slow. In 1676 the
Quakers managed to settle their boundary with East New Jersey, and they
got from Carteret a recognition of their title to their lands; but with
Andros they could come to no agreement. He haled one of the pur-
chasers of the Berkeley title, John Fenwick, off to New York for trial, like
Carteret, to answer for his assumption of authority within the dominions
of the Duke of York, and when the agreement of 1676 settled the boundary
between the Carteret and the Berkeley claims he insisted that this did not
override James’s prior claim.
In 1677 a party of Quakers fresh from England were suffered to set up
their town of Burlington up the Delaware river. They intended to found a
self-governing community and had with them a draft constitution in the
‘Concessions and Agreements ’ which Penn and his colleagues had drawn
up for them before they left England. No man was to have power over
another man’s conscience. Subject to the laws of England and to the
Concessions, all laws might be made or repealed by the colonial legisla-
ture. This was to consist of an executive nominated by Penn and his
fellow-proprietors and an assembly freely elected by the inhabitants,
with freedom of speech and full parliamentary privileges, and the execu-
tive was to have no power to levy taxes. Religious freedom, trial by jury,
open courts of justice, and the right to petition were guaranteed; there
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was to be no imprisonment for debt and no capital punishment even for
treason unless the assembly so decreed. The only limitations of local
democratic control envisaged were the quit-rents paid to the proprietors,
and their right to nominate the executive. Such autonomy was in conflict
with the claims which Andros felt compelled to put forward on James’s
behalf; but despite this uncertainty the Quakers recruited so effectively
that West New Jersey steadily increased. Yet the title was not settled until
the period of the Popish Plot. 1 Then Penn put to James, with whom he
was on terms of personal intimacy, the consideration that New Jersey
offered an admirable opportunity of showing how just his rule would be
if ever he came to reign. It was a shrewd and very worldly argument:
thus James released all his powers of sovereignty over East and West
New Jersey, and both were freed from the claims of New York.
James and his governors certainly showed a Stuart levity towards
grants of proprietary rights and reluctance to cede the sovereign powers
of government ; but their approach to the settlers was not oppressive or
resented. Colonel Nicolls, as first governor of New York, was conciliatory
towards the Dutch settlers and moderate in his claims against Con-
necticut. Taken literally, the grant to James deprived Connecticut of all
land west of Connecticut river; but Nicolls agreed on a frontier which ran
north-north-west from a point on the coast twelve miles east of the Hudson
river. He encouraged trade and shipping, organised judicial districts,
made treaties with the Indians, and gained a reputation for gentle wisdom.
But James forbade him to grant self-government to New York, and
Nicolls was forced to formulate a code of laws himself. He could not
provide for town-meetings, but he borrowed from the Dutch the idea of
elective constables and overseers with limited local powers and made
land-holding, not church-membership, the qualification for voting for
these officers. Absolute religious toleration was granted, and within the
limitations imposed on him Nicolls produced a liberal charter for the city.
He followed this up by calling representatives from the towns of Long
Island to an assembly, promising freedom and immunities equal to those
of the New England colonies. According to the normal Stuart theory of
sovereignty, the elected representatives were to sanction a code of laws
already drawn up, and when they had done so they returned home to incur
the wrath of their constituents. Nicolls could do nothing to meet their
claims for revision of taxation, control of the militia, and election of
magistrates; discontent bordering on sedition continued in the Long
Island towns. During the period of renewed Dutch rule they managed to
assert their independence, but as English rule was reasserted in 1674 they
were forced back under New York, still without the self-government
which they craved.
Andros, James’s representative after the restoration of English authority,
1 For this, see above, ch. xin, pp. 313-14.
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combined unquestioning acceptance of his orders with personal friendli-
ness for the settlers. He failed to win their loyalty, but he improved the
layout of the towns and the social and economic life of the colony, and he
constantly tried to secure some concession to popular feeling. James,
convinced that any concession would lead to further demands and would
disturb good government, refused, and New York remained the only
colony in which the settlers had no share in the legislative authority. The
crisis, here as in the West Indies, came over matters of trade and revenue.
By 1 68 1 the merchants of New York were refusing to pay customs dues,
as were the Quakers in West New Jersey and the proprietary settlers in
East New Jersey. There was widespread disaffection; Andros was called
home to answer the reports that, above all, the system was failing to
produce revenue, and in 1682 James promised an assembly on condition
that adequate revenue would be forthcoming.
The new governor, Thomas Dongan, an Irish Roman Catholic of the
broadest sympathies and most tenacious purpose, was warmly welcomed
in New York, for he brought with him a charter to convene a general
assembly representative of the freeholders, with liberty of debate and
power to consult the governor and council over taxation and legislation.
Seventeen representatives duly met in New York in October 1683, passed
some laws, and drew up a Charter of Franchises and Liberties on lines
which closely followed the achievements of the English parliament. In the
last months of his brother’s reign James, as Penn had advised, was anxious
that his conduct towards New York should persuade Englishmen how
reasonable a king he would be. Despite his recent declarations, he
accepted the charter, but, before the document could be sent out,
Charles II died and New York became a royal province under the direct
control of the Lords of Trade. James as king then rejected the charter
which he had granted as heir to the throne and took up a plan to bring all
the proprietary and charter colonies into closer dependence on each other
and the Crown ; it was partly economic but quite recognisably military in
its purpose, and it overlooked the separate characters and interests of the
individual colonies. It was a Dominion of New England into which
James and the Lords of Trade wished to incorporate New York and the
other northern colonies.
Interest was not entirely confined to the northern settlements nor
(though this was important) was it entirely concentrated on meeting the
French threat from Canada. To the south of Virginia stretched vast areas
which ran down to the Spanish frontier and were as yet almost entirely
vacant. A grant to Sir Robert Heath in 1629 had failed to people the land,
and the area was neglected for a generation. When, however, sugar and
over-settlement made Barbados look for some outlet for the emigrants
who flocked there, and the Restoration government seemed to threaten the
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freedoms enjoyed under the Commonwealth, it was to the empty lands
south of Virginia that the Barbadians turned, and in 1663 Charles II
issued his charter for Carolina, a proprietary charter in unmistakable
terms. The proprietors were those courtiers who gathered behind Shaftes-
bury, filled the Councils of Trade and Plantations and aimed to perfect
a mutually dependent imperial economy on the basis of proprietary
rights. Much the same group secured from the king in 1670 a grant of the
Bahamas, and a further grant of Hudson Bay and its adjacent terri-
tories. They were well connected and purposeful; the grant of Carolina
was probably their most significant achievement, to be put alongside the
capture of New Netherland. It covered the territory from the thirty-first
to the thirty-sixth parallel, and westwards to the south seas, and gave to
the proprietors the lands in free socage; they were absolute lords, could
set up a militia, exact customs dues, erect courts of law, make and execute
laws, and grant freedom of conscience and of trade in so far as it was
permitted by the laws of England. They might summon assemblies of the
freemen or their representatives.
When earlier claims had been swept aside the way lay open to organise
settlement from Barbados. But the Barbadians submitted a draft consti-
tution with full powers of local government, to be met by a counter-
proposal which embodied a governor and a council to be named by the
proprietors, whose agents then set to work to draw up a compromise in
the form of ‘concessions’. With experience in Barbados behind them, the
agents were more liberal than the proprietors would tolerate, and it was
not until 1665 that a fresh set of concessions was put forward, liberal in
matters of religion, free elections and the right to petition. Even then an
expedition from Barbados in 1665 was a marked failure.
At this juncture Shaftesbury, with a new charter granted in 1665, came
forward to dominate Carolina. A general assembly was called, and settler
opinion soon demanded easier and more realistic methods of granting
lands. The settlers wanted to be out, engaged in agriculture, not herded
into towns by the proprietors; they wanted simpler forms of grant and
generous estates on the model of Virginia (from which many of them had
come). Under this treatment the settlement at Albemarle took firm root
and Shaftesbury turned to foster the southern area at Port-Royal, while
he and the proprietors’ secretary, John Locke, drew up the famous
Fundamental Constitutions for the colony: an academic blue-print for
dividing the lands into counties, seignories, baronies and manors, with
the people settled in precincts, four to a colony. A hereditary nobility of
landgraves and caciques was to be created, the proprietors were to become
hereditary officials, and the freeholders to hold minor offices and to elect
their representatives to a parliament. Under the freemen were to be
leetmen, bound to the soil in feudal style. This ‘medley of feudal doctrine
and seventeenth-century social theory’ had little effect. A few baronies
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were laid out, but the chief value of the Constitutions was to show the
ideas of enlightened men of the proprietary type. They wanted religious
toleration, trial by jury and limited self-government, but also an aristo-
cratic form of rule, and they thought that if a colony was to prosper it
must have in England a parent-body of proprietors, or a company, to
organise the supply of men and capital.
Meanwhile Shaftesbury got together a colonising expedition. The pro-
prietors put up the money and, after reinforcement at Barbados, the
expedition, defying the claims of the proprietors, founded Charles Town
on Ashley river. Yet Shaftesbury, intent on building up an interchange of
commodities between his three interests (at Charles Town, at Albemarle,
and at Bermuda) could not afford to let the settlers depart. He recruited
more settlers from England and Barbados, and the proprietors showed
themselves willing to compromise as the colony’s parliament began to sit
in 1671. In 1672 there were about 400 settlers, by 1682 over a thousand,
and by 1685 over 2500. The influx continued, from France where the
Huguenots were forbidden to seek asylum in the French colonies, from
Barbados and other colonies, and from England, organised by the pro-
prietors; from 1682 onwards settlement began to spread inland while a
new Charles Town, more commodious for trade and defence, was built at
the junction of the Ashley and Cooper rivers.
Danger from a small Indian tribe, the Westoes, and from the Spaniards
to the south delayed inland expansion, but economic life developed
smoothly and steadily. Although the proprietors stood by the Funda-
mental Constitutions in theory they were realistic enough not to insist in
detail, and government was ‘ simple and satisfactory ’. But as the original
proprietors either died or were disgraced as Stuart dynasticism triumphed
over the Exclusionists, new ideas took hold. First came a complaint that
a few privileged men were monopolising the trade in furs. Then the
colonists rejected amendments to the Constitutions, not because they
were harsh (for they were designed to limit the powers of the proprietors
and to put more authority in the hands of the representatives of the
people), but because they emanated from authority without discussion.
The proprietors became more oppressive and heavy, and by 1684 they had
driven their governor to resign by insisting that his duty was to govern,
not to let the people govern him. With the accession of James II the new
governor insisted that each member of the parliament must swear allegi-
ance to James, fidelity to the proprietors, and acceptance of the Funda-
mental Constitutions: those who refused were excluded. Though the
essence of the economy of Carolina was trade between separate colonies
and between the colonies and the nearby Spanish settlements, the pro-
prietors, through fear of losing their charter, adhered to the Navigation
Acts and so increased the stress between them and the settlers. The colony
was ready to revolt, the governor proclaimed martial law and refused to
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call another parliament. The Fundamental Constitutions were inoperative
and a rival governor appeared, only to be disavowed by the proprietors.
Clearly only military force would perpetuate the proprietors’ English and
authoritarian views where they conflicted with the settlers’ needs.
Most of the care of the Carolina proprietors was, naturally, spent on the
southern settlement at Charles Town. But in the north, on the fertile lands
near Albemarle, was a competent settlement whose members had come
mainly from Virginia, reinforced by some Quakers. Devoted largely to
subsistence fanning, they had little external trade save in tobacco and
furs. This trade was almost entirely in the hands of New England mer-
chants ; the proprietors urged in vain that Albemarle should ship direct to
England, or should trade with the southern settlement. Trouble came to a
head in 1677-8, when the colonists resolved not to pay a tax of a penny a
pound on tobacco exported to other colonies, imprisoned the governor,
the president of the assembly and almost all the deputies, and took control
for a year. The proprietors managed to evict a popularly appointed
governor, but their own appointee was taken by Algerian pirates on his
way out and did not arrive until 1683. By then Albemarle was in great
confusion, and the settlers seized the governor and banished him. Carolina
clearly revealed the power of the navigation policy to alienate overseas
traders who needed intercolonial exchanges, and the inability of the
proprietors to enforce their will.
Through all these changes the number of Quakers steadily increased, and
by the time that their leader George Fox made a journey among them in
1672 there were communities in Virginia (with an offshoot at Albemarle),
in East New Jersey, Rhode Island and Maryland. Normally they were
without political influence and living under more or less hostile govern-
ments ; but in Rhode Island the Quakers dominated the situation and sup-
plied many of the governors and deputies. Early proposals to purchase
territory in America, where the Quakers might lead their own lives without
interference, all came to nothing until 1680, when William Penn petitioned
the king for a grant of land north of Maryland, to extend north as far as
was plantable. The Quaker’s friendship with royalty ensured that the
Lords of Trade would look well at his request, and in 1681 a royal charter
gave to Penn the territory bounded on the east by the Delaware and to the
‘three and fortieth degree of northern latitude’ — a phrase which led to
serious disputes later. To the south the boundary lay on a semi-circle run-
ning north and north-west from New Castle (which the Duke of York had
insisted on keeping) until it cut the fortieth parallel; then westwards along
the parallel for five degrees of longitude. Penn was anxious to have access
to the ocean, and this brought him into dispute with Baltimore, which had
a legal title to the Dutch and Swedish settlements on the west bank of the
Delaware. Eventually, in 1682, James ceded to Penn New Castle settle-
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ment and all the territory on the right bank of the Delaware to its mouth;
this brought forward Baltimore to deny his right to make such a grant, but
at the end of 1685 the Lords of Trade decided that the land in dispute did
not belong to Baltimore.
Penn had become lord of the province of Pennsylvania, could make
laws with the advice and consent of his freemen, execute the laws, appoint
judges and magistrates, grant pardons, and create towns and boroughs.
His executive and judicial powers were almost unlimited, and generous
though Penn was to his colony, he undertook the business of administra-
tion before embarking on law-making. He organised the dispatch of
settlers and sent out orders which resulted in the planned layout of the
city of Philadelphia, while his deputy-governor was instructed to call a
council, to receive the allegiance of the people, to settle boundaries and to
distribute lands, to keep the peace, to issue ordinances, but not to summon
an assembly. Yet when he set out his Frame of Government for the colony,
Penn revealed himself as a political philosopher of a high order; although
outwardly using the same institutions as most colonial constitutions he
gave great powers to his provincial council, an elected body, and gave his
governor no powers independent of the council. Then Penn sailed to his
colony in 1682, called an Assembly elected by the freeholders and, having
settled the colony’s boundaries and conferred citizenship on all residents,
set out the principles of the colony in the Great Law. Capital punishment
was to be inflicted only for murder and treason, and liberty of conscience
was guaranteed. Democratic equality before the law was to be the mark
of the new society.
Penn was intent to preserve friendly relations with the Indians, made
treaties with them and paid them for the lands occupied. His touch was
sure and confident, and he spent much time bringing his territory to fruit.
When he returned to England in 1 684 Philadelphia had over 2500 inhabi-
tants and the colony over 8000, notable for their mixture of races and
languages — Swedes, Dutch, Finns, Welsh, Germans, English, French,
Danes, Scots and Irish. A prosperous trade developed, with its centre at
Philadelphia and its markets in the West Indies and other colonies; town
and country were fairly balanced, with manufactures of linen, glass and
leather to supplement the agricultural surpluses. Yet after Penn’s return
to England religious and political quarrels developed, and the council
showed a marked tendency to develop into an oligarchy. In 1685 Penn
sent out a new governor. Captain Blackwell, who was not a Quaker and
was determined to set up an efficient government; but the opposition
secured his recall, and Penn promised to accept any governor whom the
council might elect. Quarrels continued, helped by a split among the
Quakers themselves; although the colony continued prosperous, as a
‘Holy Experiment’ it was a tragedy.
Virginia came but little into the discussions between the Lords of Trade
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and the colonies until a late date. Dependent largely on tobacco exports,
Virginia continued surreptitious shipments to the Dutch who controlled
the European tobacco-market. Reasonably prosperous and stable, the
colony took advantage of the constitutional confusion of the restoration
period to declare that supreme power was vested in its Assembly and to
elect Sir William Berkeley as its governor. Under him it returned to the
Stuart allegiance, and he was ordered to accept the Assembly as constitu-
tional and to secure the passage of necessary laws, but also to ensure that
the Navigation Acts were observed and to discourage over-much planting
of tobacco. Berkeley soon became almost an absolute ruler, naming his
own councillors and gathering round him a party of wealthy planters,
while the House of Burgesses became a close and oligarchic body,
divorced from the popular will which it was supposed to represent. The
franchise was limited to freeholders, and ill-judged taxation, unwise
spending and administrative abuses caused a situation which was made
explosive by the unstable price of tobacco.
In 1675 a brutal scalping of two settlers by Indians caused a fierce
punitive expedition, and the whole frontier was unsafe. Governor Berkeley
was old and weak, and the Assembly proved as ineffective as the governor.
The frightened settlers chose their own leader, young Nathaniel Bacon,
and enlisted as volunteers under his command, but were declared
rebels and ordered to disband. Bacon’s rebellion lasted until 1676, when
Bacon took and destroyed Jamestown, and then shortly died of fever.
After his death the rebels surrendered, and although the king had
promised an amnesty, the embittered Berkeley put several of them to
death. A new governor, Captain Herbert Jeffreys, then arrived, while a
commission was appointed to review the affairs of Virginia and a fleet
with five companies of regular soldiers was sent to crush the rebellion
(which had already died down). The new officers sent home a sympathetic
report of the grievances of the colony, and the charter granted after the
rebellion confirmed the right of the colonial Assembly to control taxation
and left it to the king to make land grants in future. The economic im-
balance could not easily be remedied; there seemed no solution to the
tobacco problem save freedom of trade, but legislation limited the number
of ports from which trade could be carried on, and angry planters began
to impose their own quota system by destroying their neighbours’ crops.
The new governor was at loggerheads with the Assembly, and another
revolt seemed inevitable when the news of the downfall of James II
arrived. When William and Mary were officially proclaimed they were
accepted with relief ; for since Virginia needed England both for the sale of
her tobacco and the purchase of her necessities she remained, if uneasily,
at home within the empire.
Maryland was bound to be deeply involved in political disputes because
the proprietor. Lord Baltimore, an avowed Roman Catholic, was deeply
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concerned to secure liberty of conscience and was, by virtue of his charter,
the owner of rights and privileges which made him almost absolute.
During the Commonwealth his authority was defied, and at one time it
seemed likely that the Puritans would set up an independent government.
But, as religious issues took second place after those of trade and defence,
Baltimore managed to get his title recognised by the Committee of Trade,
asserting his constitutional claims against the assembly of the settlers who
were claiming the right to enact laws without his consent. Baltimore
secured his position largely by appointing an effective and sympathetic
governor, young Philip Carteret. In Maryland too tobacco was the sole
industry. In the uplands the soil was fertile, and output was enough to
keep planters and farmers content despite falling prices and unthrifty
habits. Labour was got from servants and negro slaves, and tobacco was the
currency for the payment of taxes, fees and dues. As Maryland possessed
no shipping its tobacco was carried largely in the ships of the New
Englanders engaged in purposeful evasion of the Navigation Acts. With
this Baltimore was in the fullest sympathy, for he held that the trouble
with tobacco was not over-production, but restriction of the markets by
the Navigation Acts. Yet he officially complied, collected the payments
due and enforced the giving of bonds by shipowners.
With the death of Lord Baltimore and the succession of his son Calvert
in 1675 a far more authoritarian regime was instituted. He did indeed
strive to increase trade and prosperity, but he ruled by manipulation of
interests rather than by taking the people into partnership ; his friends and
relatives controlled the administration, and council and assembly were
constantly at feud. Apart from this, Baltimore had to deal with Penn and
the disputed claims to river frontage on the Chesapeake. The dispute took
both proprietors to England in 1684, and there Baltimore was detained
until the revolution of 1688. His declaration in favour of the ‘Old
Pretender’ passed off quietly enough, for the people of Maryland were
scattered and political action was difficult. But rumours spread of Jesuit
activity to stir up the Indians and massacre the Protestant settlers, the
Roman Catholicism of the proprietor and his attempts to govern in an
absolutist manner roused suspicion, and suspicion increased when no
orders for the acknowledgement of William and Mary were published.
Discontent came to a head in 1689 : an association was founded to defend
the Protestant religion and to acknowledge William and Mary. Balti-
more’s efforts were weakened by his absence in England and lack of sup-
port from the Lords of Trade. He was not formally deprived of his
charter, but neither did they support his claims; for they suspected him of
opposing their plan of uniting the American colonies and of enforcing
restraints of trade by the Navigation Acts and the customs system.
Maryland in effect became a royal province and the proprietor’s claims
were ignored.
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Although the political and economic balance lay with Massachusetts,
New York and the problems of the Jersey settlements occupied English
attention for some years. Only when Massachusetts became involved in a
serious Indian war did the Lords of Trade take a more active interest. This
was in 1675, when the Wampanoags under their King Philip attacked the
Quaker-controlled colony at Rhode Island. Other tribes soon joined,
Connecticut and Massachusetts were drawn into the war, and the whole
frontier was terrorised by burnings, scalpings and murders. The great
tribe of the Narragansetts, with whom relations had hitherto been
friendly, was attacked by Massachusetts, Plymouth and Connecticut, in
order to forestall Indian hostility. Rhode Island, Plymouth and Massa-
chusetts suffered pillage until in the summer of 1676 King Philip began
to find it impossible to keep his confederacy together and in August was
himself killed. With this war ended the last serious attempt of the Indians
to dispute European claims to the north Atlantic seaboard. But the
Indians had penetrated to the heart of the settlements, destroying growing
crops, towns and hamlets. Famine followed the war; the fur trade was
ruined, as was the commerce of New England, both with England and the
West Indian islands.
While King Philip’s War was still in the balance, there arrived at Boston
Edward Randolph as a special commissioner to inquire into and report
upon the colony. He was a confirmed supporter of Stuart pretensions and
of that unified system of imperial commerce for which the later Stuart
councils stood. He was also a devoted member of the Church of England
and could see nothing but evil in the Puritan government which had
usurped power. To bring Massachusetts into closer dependence on the
Crown he recommended a Quo Warranto writ. The old charges were
revived. The suffrage had been restricted, the boundaries extended at the
cost of Massachusetts’ neighbours, taxes taken from non-freemen, appeals
to England been denied; the Puritans had evaded the Navigation Acts,
set up their own mint and coined their own currency, thereby diminishing
the king’s revenue and upsetting the imperial system of trade. The colony
did nothing to mitigate the charges and seemed more set on its chartered
rights than on allegiance to the Crown ; and the agents sent to London
were told to discuss nothing which called the charter in question. Massa-
chusetts only passed a law enforcing the Navigation Acts when English
merchants secured from the king (whose revenue they alleged was
reduced by £60,000 a year) an embargo on the trade of New England.
To enforce the Navigation Acts Randolph acted as collector, surveyor
and searcher of the customs, in which capacities he had infinite power to
interfere with commerce but little to enforce compliance with the Acts.
He was supported by the governors of Virginia and New Hampshire when
he claimed that the merchants and shippers carried on illicit trade with
alien territories and that the magistrates connived at these breaches of the
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Navigation Acts. The Lords of Trade were determined, as they began to
canvass the idea of uniting the New England colonies into one dominion,
that Massachusetts’ charter itself must be annulled, as the king success-
fully discounted the charters of many English boroughs. 1 The attorney-
general was ordered to proceed against the colony; Randolph had the
satisfaction of himself delivering the writ of Quo Warranto, and in
October 1684 the charter was declared null and void.
This left the Lords of Trade with the task of framing a more suitable
form of government. They were set on the unification of the colonies, and
the annulment of Massachusetts’ charter was part of a general move.
Randolph’s commission applied to all the New England colonies and,
with him to urge them on, the Lords of Trade concluded that chartered
and proprietary colonies in general could not be reconciled with their
plans. Where some measure of sovereignty had been granted away, the
right to legislate brought into question the Navigation Acts which con-
flicted with the interests of the commercial classes in the colonies. One
after the other, the charters of Connecticut, Rhode Island, the Jerseys,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Carolina, the Bahamas and Bermuda were sub-
ject to Quo Warranto inquiries. The death of Charles II in 1685, the
turmoil of Monmouth’s rebellion, and the impossibility of creating so
many alternative governments, staved off the blow from all except
Connecticut, Rhode Island and the Jersey settlements. But already it had
become clear that neither the money nor the men were available to give to
each colony its own governor and administration, and that union would
simplify the problems of defence and, above all, of the administration of
the Navigation Acts. Anxious to form a union, the Lords of Trade agreed
to annex to Massachusetts the colonies of Maine, New Hampshire,
Plymouth, and the Narragansett country, and to add Rhode Island and
Connecticut as soon as their charters should have been annulled.
Despite the annulment of its charter, Massachusetts was allowed to
continue with its old forms of governor, magistrates and deputies, and
when the Lords of Trade placed New Hampshire and Maine under
Massachusetts in 1685, they accomplished under royal auspices an expan-
sion which the colony had long sought in an independent fashion.
Connecticut also was incorporated in this New England group, the
council of that colony offering to submit to this solution although the
General Court had asked for incorporation with New York. There
remained New York itself. When Charles II died and James became king,
he could evade granting the Charter of Liberties and Privileges to New
York and consider his lands there a Crown colony, capable of being
added to the envisaged union. Governor Dongan, fearing French moves,
was convinced that New York could not provide adequate defence unless
1 See above, ch. xm, p. 317.
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Connecticut and the Jerseys were added to her, and when he learned that
Connecticut had been added to New England, it seemed to him that the
only means of producing adequate mili tary strength was to add New York
to that group.
Dongan’s suggestion carried great weight, and in 1688 a new commis-
sion was issued, joining all the English colonies from the Pemaquid river
to Pennsylvania in the Dominion of New England. The constitution, as
proposed by the Lords of Trade, was to consist of a governor and council
chosen by the king, and of an assembly elected by the people. James,
however, ruled out reference to the assembly, and governor and council
were left with powers to legislate, levy taxes, set up courts of justice, and
themselves sit as a court of first instance. There was to be a right of appeal
to the courts in England, and colonial laws were to be submitted to
England for approval. The abolition of the popular assembly savours of
Stuart absolutism, but the distances involved, and the cross-interests
within the colonies and between the colonies, made an assembly seem of
doubtful value; and the popular assemblies, especially in Massachusetts,
were not always democratic or representative of the majority. Their aboli-
tion was, as experience had shown, the only way of ending the dominance
of the Puritans, and the constitutional stringency was alleviated by the
grant of religious liberty and measures to regularise and stabilise the
system of land-tenures.
The union of the colonies was advocated largely for military reasons.
The Treaty of Westminster ended the Dutch War in 1674, but laid the
country and the colonies open to French attacks and French intrigues.
The Dominion of New England, with Connecticut, was held to control
a force of 13,279 militiamen,' and the inclusion of New York to add a
further 2000. Thus a regular force of about two hundred soldiers was sup-
ported by a reserve of over fifteen thousand militiamen — a formidable
force for defence, and a powerful machine for the capture of the French
colony in Canada if that should at any time seem desirable. The governor
was, significantly, given sole command of the troops. But the extension
of the Dominion to include New York proved a weakness, not a source of
strength; the area was too vast for adequate communication, and the
advantage of consolidation, which the Dominion should have brought, was
dissipated ; it lost any chance of becoming an economic and social unit.
The choice of a governor for the Dominion fell on Sir Edmund Andros,
honest and uncompromising, but with a background of unsympathetic
authority during his governorship of New York and of disputes with the
Quakers of West New Jersey and with the proprietors of East New Jersey.
His task was difficult enough, for the Puritans refused to accept the new
dispensation. Deprived of their assembly, they declared that they were
‘abridged of their liberty as Englishmen’. With an empty treasury and no
legal power to impose taxes, the provisional government was bound to be
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weak, and indirect taxes (import duties, excise and tonnage) were levied.
Though this did not arouse serious opposition, as direct taxation might
have done, the whole question of taxes upon trade was at issue. While the
Lords of Trade wanted to bring New England into a comprehensive
scheme for imperial trade, the merchants of Massachusetts were anxious
to render the minimum of conformity and to secure modifications which
would enable them to persist in their illegal trade. Something was done
towards the enforcement of the Navigation Acts by making the four ports
of Boston, Salem, Ipswich and Great Island the only places where goods
might enter the Dominion and by creating a Vice-Admiral’s Court for
trying cases of smuggling. But Randolph got almost no support in his
efforts to get the Acts properly enforced, and even the Vice-Admiral’s
Court could not be trusted to give uncorrupt verdicts.
Disappointed but determined, Randolph pressed for the dispatch of a
regular governor, and the commission for Andros was hurried through so
that he arrived in Boston in December 1686, as governor of all the New
England colonies except Connecticut and Rhode Island, against which
Quo Warranto writs were out, but whose charters meanwhile remained
valid. Rhode Island submitted rather than have her charter annulled,
and Connecticut was soon added. While the provisional government had
been placatory and sympathetic and had done something to bring unity
to the Dominion and to keep the colonists at peace, Andros had a much
more intransigent outlook and started with the handicap that he was
ordered to ‘tear up a country’s institutions by the roots’. Loyal to the
Stuarts, he widely proclaimed the birth of the ‘Old Pretender’; thus when
the news of the Glorious Revolution reached America Andros was inevit-
ably regarded as a royalist and rebellion broke out. Boston was the centre
of the revolt; the fort, castle, and royal frigate were seized, Randolph was
sent to the common jail and the governor himself imprisoned. The revolu-
tion was bloodless, but it overthrew the Dominion of New England.
Connecticut and Rhode Island resumed their charters and reorganised
their governments. Massachusetts was too deeply involved in conflict
with royal authority for her opposition to count entirely in her favour or
for the eloquence of her agent in England to achieve the restoration of her
charter. Only in 1691 did William and Mary grant a charter, and then it
was not such as it had been ; voters qualified on a basis of property, not of
religion, and appeals were allowed from the local courts to the King in
Council. Yet the new charter pushed out the boundaries of Massachusetts
to include Maine and New Plymouth, and thus perpetuated an important
concept of the short-lived Dominion, that of defence against the French.
The power and stability of the French in Canada were negligible in
comparison with the growing weight of the English colonies. The extent
of the French threat depended on the determination of the rulers, the
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support obtained from Europe, and the determination to enlist the Indian
tribes as auxiliaries. The vastness of the problem and of the possibilities
of a French kingdom extending across the continent (whatever its width
might prove to be) and for fifteen hundred leagues in longitude was
realised. But the strength of France was fully committed to her struggles
in Europe, and the achievement was as small as the possibilities were vast.
To achieve their supremacy in North America, and to maintain the fur
trade on which their colony’s livelihood depended, the French were con-
vinced that they must break the power of the Iroquois confederacy — the
‘Five Nations’ of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and
Senecas; for the Iroquois were rivals of the Hurons and other tribes,
through whose lands furs came to the French markets at Quebec, Trois
Rivieres and Montreal, and who were allies of the French. The Iroquois
were tied to the fur trade of the Hudson river. They got their arms from,
and took their furs to, the Dutch traders and were intent to harry and
destroy the French colony. During the first Iroquois War, about 1640,
the French accepted the conclusion that to free themselves from the
Iroquois threat they must neutralise the Dutch colonies, either by conquest
or by purchasing their lands. But France was racked by the Fronde.
Weak government at home led to ineffective policy in the New World,
where the French possessions in the Antilles were sold to private owners,
the Compagnie des Cent Associds gave way to the Compagnie des Habitants
in Canada, and in Acadia civil war was the prelude to the capture of the
colony by the British in 1654. Montreal was almost abandoned, and
succour arrived only just in time, with the Ursulines to supplement the
inspired Christianity of the small settlement and a meagre reinforcement
of soldiers.
There was in all this but little which portended any serious threat to
British or Dutch colonial interests. Indeed, if the French were to reply
effectively to the threat of Iroquois encirclement it must be by turning
away from the areas of English and Dutch influence and recuperating
their trade by routes to the north. The Ottawas, for example, welcomed
French trade and the French alliance against the Iroquois. Even with
allies among the Indians the French were hard put to it. By 1660 their
total population in Canada amounted to less than 2000, and only the most
tenuous and determined existence was possible there. The Iroquois
prowled round the houses and fields of Montreal, women were seized as
they went about their tasks, and the men carried arms at all times. In this
year a band of Iroquois warriors descended the St Lawrence to extirpate
the French and capture Quebec itself. But a devoted company of sixteen
men, under the leadership of Adam Dollard, commander of the small
garrison of Montreal, held them for eight days of bitter fighting at the
St Lawrence above Montreal. They were all killed, but the Iroquois
retired and the French colony was saved.
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Later in the year a well-laden convoy of canoes manned by Ottawas
brought to Quebec a supply of furs which enabled the colonists to main-
tain themselves. But the Iroquois remained an ever-present threat, and in
1661 Pierre Bouchier, commandant of Trois Rivieres, was sent to France
to solicit aid. Bouchier returned with about a hundred new colonists, but
without military support. Although the governor pleaded for troops with
which he could make Louis master of America, nothing was forthcoming
until 1665, when, the Turks having been driven back in Hungary, 1 Louis
sent the Carignan-Salieres regiment of some 1200 men to Quebec: a
magnificent addition to French strength, as previously the governor had
only about thirty regular soldiers at his disposal. More important was the
new sense of interest and urgency. Great concepts of a French-American
empire were accepted, and the personalities of the governors and intendants
in Canada gave weight and purpose to these concepts.
Under a new governor, an experienced soldier, the Marquis de Tracy,
Canada experienced a reinvigoration whiph accorded well with the arrival
of the troops. Montreal, which had enjoyed an independent status under
the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, was brought under royal control in 1665.
But a badly prepared winter campaign against the Iroquois did not defeat
or annihilate them. Four of their five 4 nations * accepted a treaty of peace,
but the Mohawks held out. Tracy himself led another expedition which
penetrated past Lake Champlain into the Iroquois territory, burned
villages and destroyed provender, but could not come to grips with the
Iroquois who withdrew and avoided decisive action. It was an impressive
display by the most powerful army so far deployed in North America.
Tracy had starved and humiliated the Mohawks. Whether they made a
formal submission is not clear, but there was no further trouble between
French and Iroquois until 1687.
Tracy’s attacks on the Iroquois were defensive, for the existence of the
colony was at stake; but they were also part of an ambitious plan for
domination in the north. The display of French power followed hard on
the English capture of the Dutch colony and was in a sense stimulated by
the ambitions of the English. At New York James’s governor, Nicolls,
would gladly have attacked the French; but Massachusetts and Con-
necticut were not so eager, so that he held his hand. In Europe Louis,
bound by treaty to help the Netherlands if they were attacked, offered
mediation and, when Clarendon spumed his intervention, declared war on
England in 1666. It was, however, only in October that the news was
known in the English colonies, and by that time Tracy had safely extricated
his army from the Iroquois territories.
The opportunity for an English attack on Canada was therefore lost,
the more so since Louis, reluctant as he appeared to fight England,
attacked with a will in the West Indies, where the English possessions in
1 See below, ch. xxi, p. 511.
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the Leeward Islands (especially St Christopher’s) suffered heavily. Plague-
ridden, fire-stricken, impoverished and divided, England was anxious for
peace, and Louis was equally anxious so as to invade the Spanish Nether-
lands in vindication of his claim to the Spanish inheritance. 1 So the two
powers agreed, early in 1667, on a restoration of the conquered Leeward
Islands to England and of Acadia to France. England had not been
defeated in the war as a whole, and the Treaty of Breda confirmed her in
the possession of the Dutch colonies in America. Louis was more inter-
ested in the European aspects of the Spanish inheritance than in the vast
possibilities of an empire in America. The loss of the Dutch colonies to
the English, thus accepted by France, meant a change in the North
American situation which cannot be overestimated; for Orange, Man-
hattan and the Hudson river were powerful rivals to Quebec and Montreal
in the fur trade, and the wampum, which was the small currency of all
Indian trade, largely derived from the beaches of Long Island. Moreover,
the territory which passed to the Duke of York brought English and
French into contact and rivalry and cut the French off from coastal
advance to the south. From this time English fears were aroused when-
ever the French seemed likely to move south of the St Lawrence; and the
French felt themselves threatened whenever the English colonists seemed
ready to cross the Alleghenies and to emerge from the coastal lands into
the hinterland through which the French must pass, by the Mississippi
and the Ohio, if they would expand southwards.
The rivalry for position in America led to endless clashes; but France
was absorbed in European projects, and although she was at the height of
her power the English, almost in a client position in Europe, carried the
day in America. But the French officials in Canada were not lacking in
vigour or in vision. Jean Talon as intendant from 1665 to 1668 and from
1670 to 1672, and Frontenac as governor from 1672 to 1682 and from
1689 to 1701, brought to Canada a knowledge and a purpose which might
well have changed the map of Nbrth America. For Talon the main prob-
lems were those of settlement. He brought the population of Canada, by
organised recruitment of girls and boys, from about 3000 to almost 7000
souls, and when the Carignan-Salieres regiment was called back to France
about 400 of the men remained as habitants. The lands were granted in
seigneuries, and the seigneurs had the duty of establishing fixed numbers of
emigrants on their lands. But in 1666 Colbert told Talon that Louis
thought it imprudent to deprive France of men in order to people Canada,
and that he declined to accept his plans for making Canada a great and
powerful State; and in 1672 he had to report that no revenue at all was
available for Canada.
Yet there was real interest in France. In 1663 the Crown took over the
colony as its property and adopted a plan for combining the French
1 See above, ch. rx, p. 210.
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interests in the West Indies and the north by establishing the great
Compagnie des Indes Occidentals, so that the northern and the sub-
tropical colonies should make good each other’s wants on lines parallel to
those which the English imperialists were accepting at this time. Talon’s
enthusiasms were always to some extent intermingled with his personal
interests, and his lack of enthusiasm for the Compagnie des Indes Occi-
dentals was imputed to his participation in trade. But serious efforts were
made to encourage fishing and shipping, and industries began to take
shape in weaving, leather-work, brewing and shipbuilding. For Talon such
developments were but the preliminaries to expansion. He was inspired
by the vastness of the American scene. Manhattan and Orange must be
acquired, if necessary by war; the European wars offered great opportu-
nities to conquer enormous and potentially wealthy lands in America, and
he saw no reason why the French colony should not extend to Florida and
the borders of the New England colonies, and even into Mexico. Fears of
French intentions were fully justified.
The Treaty of Breda set a limit to the ambitions of both groups of
colonists; all possessions were to be restored, and at least for the moment
any French design on the key-area of New Netherland had to be aban-
doned. But the Mohawks had suffered a severe reverse and French
prestige stood high; and there was a strong party within Canada which
required little more than official connivance to carry French expansion
through the Iroquois lands and into the south and west. The curbing of
the Iroquois had been followed by a considerable movement to the west;
the period in which Indians carrying furs for the French had been forced to
run the gauntlet saw Frenchmen working outwards from the St Lawrence
in pursuit of furs and French missionaries travelling in search of Indians.
As the Hurons dispersed to the area near Lake Superior and Lake
Michigan, and the Ottawas to the Mississippi, they made contact with
new tribes and taught them the need of European goods and the potential
market for their furs. The fur trade thus penetrated inland. The Sioux
south-west of Lake Superior and the Crees to its north, expanding north-
wards towards Hudson Bay, were the two largest tribes brought into the
French economic orbit.
Expansion to the north was not neglected, but priority lay with expan-
sion to the south and west, if only because the Indians whom the French
knew best reacted to the Iroquois check by a return to Lake Michigan and
the surrounding area. The Sea of the South was much under discussion;
whereas the normal fur-route, under Ottawa domination, veered north-
wards from the St Lawrence by way of the Ottawa river, Talon in 1668
sent a party to explore the southern route via Lake Ontario and Lake
Simcoe and, in 1669, sent Louis Jolliet by the Ottawa river to the northern
shore of Lake Huron, south through Lake Huron to Lake St Clair, to the
narrows into Lake Erie, and overland to the western shore of Lake
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Ontario. There Jolliet met a party of Frenchmen which was on its way
through Lake Ontario to explore round Lake Erie and to seek the
southern and western Indian tribes. Robert Rene de La Salle was its
guiding spirit, but he was accompanied by two Sulpician missionaries
whose presence indicated both the missionary zeal inspiring the French
moves and the jealousy of the Jesuit pretensions. La Salle’s overriding idea
was to move south-west from the Iroquois country, with French control
of the lakes at his back, and towards New Spain : an idea which occupied
many French minds, including that of Talon. They hoped that the
Mississippi (which figured in Indian reports as the ‘Ohio’) would lead to
the south and west and into the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean.
When the Sulpicians reached Lake Michigan they found the territory
between Lake Superior, Lake Huron and the upper waters of the
Mississippi full of fur-traders and a Jesuit mission established at
Green Bay. While the fur-traders were fugitive and illiterate, so that
the extent of their journeys can only be guessed, the Jesuits were deter-
mined and well co-ordinated, and by 1670 their mission was firmly
established.
Talon spent the years from 1 668 to 1 670 in Europe, engaged in discussions
with Colbert; he obtained moderate support for his expansionist plans
and a Recollet mission to help him, and the Sulpicians, in curbing Jesuit
influence. Stirred by the achievements of Jolliet, La Salle, the Sulpicians
and the Jesuits, he sent an envoy in 1671 to Sault Ste Marie, where Lake
Superior flows into Lake Huron, to claim for France the sovereignty of all
lands bounded on the one side by the northern and western seas and on
the other by the South Sea.
Thus French ambitions were given a definite and formal expression —
and La Salle was moving south from Lake Ontario, while the Jesuits from
Lake Michigan were ready for a journey south to the Mississippi. Even
from France came the dictum that ‘after the increase of the colony of
Canada, nothing is of greater importance for that country and for the
service of His Majesty than the discovery of a passage to the South Sea’. 1
The instruction was brought to America by Louis de Buade, comte de
Frontenac, who arrived in Canada as governor in 1 672 and became deeply
imbued with a sense of its destiny, with the future of Quebec as the capital
of a great American empire, with the ideas and plans of Talon. French
expansion, nevertheless, could not be carried out according to plan.
Frontenac himself was not hostile to the Jesuits; but Talon was, and
Colbert and Louis were suspicious of their ultramontanism.
Jolliet spent the winter of 1672 with the Jesuits at their mission at
Mackinac between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron and with the Jesuit
Father Jacques Marquette crossed from Green Bay on Lake Michigan to
the Wisconsin river and so, in June 1673, to the Mississippi. Disap-
1 J, Bartlet Brebner, The Explorers of North America (London, 1933), p. 252.
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pointed that the great river flowed straight to the south, when the
Missouri joined them from the west they were doubtful whether they
ought not to follow it upstream since Indians reported that it would lead
to an open prairie and another river which ran into the Gulf of California.
They went past the mouth of the Ohio, but then turned and began to work
northwards. They were told by Indians, who were armed with guns which
indicated that they had trading-contact with Europeans, that they were
only ten days’ journey from the sea and would run grave dangers, if they
continued, from armed Indians and the Spaniards whom they would meet
at their journey’s end. They were convinced beyond doubt that the
Mississippi ran into the Gulf of Mexico, pot into the Gulf of California,
and carried this news back to Canada.
The news set fire to the Canadian frontier, for it proved that there was
substance in the rumours of a practicable waterway from Canada to the
Gulf of Mexico, and that a French North America was not only possible,
but would confine the English to the coastal areas bounded by the
Alleghenies. Yet Louis, deeply committed to his wars in Europe, had little
or nothing to spare for Canada. English neutrality was worth not only the
support for the Stuarts which Louis promised in the Dover Treaties, but
also a great deal of acquiescence in the New World, and Frontenac had to
renounce all hope of succour from France. Even systematic emigration,
especially of the young girls essential for developing a populous French
colony, was not to be counted on. Forceful, ambitious, and convinced of
the potential strength of Canada, Frontenac was compelled to adopt
methods which were less direct and authoritative than he might well have
chosen. During his first period as governor, up to 1682, he received no
military reinforcements at all; it was marked by consolidation of the
English position and by rivalry in the far north as the English Hudson’s
Bay Company began to develop a maritime route to the Crees and to the
source of the finest furs which had hitherto come to Canada.
The initiative for the Hudson’s Bay Company came from two enter-
prising Canadian coureurs de bois, Pierre Esprit Radisson and Medard
Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers. Both had come to Canada in their child-
hood and were familiar with the Indians in travelling and trading. In
1659 they pooled resources (they were brothers-in-law) for a voyage to the
forests of Wisconsin, where they spent the winter with the Sioux and
returned to Lake Superior in the spring to meet the Crees and to hear from
them about the great Bay of the North and the wealth in furs which could
be got there. They returned to Montreal convinced of the need to approach
this Eldorado by sea, not by land from Canada, and anxious to rally
French support. But the voyage from which they returned was contrary
to a ban on trading with Indians in the woods; they were fined, forced to
pay taxes on their furs, and derided. Determined to carry out their plan,
they sought support in France and then in New England. While they were
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kicking their heels there they met the royal commissioners sent out from
England to settle the boundaries of the English colonies and to bring them
to loyal acceptance of the Stuarts. By George Cartwright the Canadians
were persuaded that they could get support from England and were
brought to London. They found Charles himself much taken with their
stories and plans, and the group of nobles and statesmen engaged in
formulating a balanced imperial policy ready to help them on a modest
scale: in 1668 two ships set out from London, and one with Groseilliers
aboard spent the winter at Hudson Bay and returned with a cargo of
prime furs.
Spurred by the hopes of profit and urging the possibility of sailing
through the Bay to seek a north-west passage, the group of courtiers and
their city associates in 1670 secured an epoch-making charter for the
Hudson’s Bay Company, which set out an English claim as the counter-
part of the French claim to the lands to the south ; for Charles made the
company absolute lords and proprietors of all lands on the shores of the
Bay and drained by rivers running into it. Whereas the French were
beginning to get some realistic notion of the lands which they claimed, the
English had little idea of what was involved in this charter. Their posts in
the Bay were insignificant, and their powers of penetrating into the hinter-
land negligible. They could indeed sail into the Bay with a disconcerting
capacity for navigation in arctic waters, and their goods brought the
Indians down to trade with them. But they did little or nothing to chal-
lenge the French or to assert title to their vast heritage, and even convinced
themselves that their ambitions were reconcilable with French claims; for
them the serious rivalry lay in the fur trade, not in any strategic claim to
land — and so in fact the problem remained, for Hudson Bay never posed
a military threat to Canada although it might seem (as at times it did seem
to the French) to threaten encirclement from the north.
So little support was there in France for any expansion from Canada that
the exploits of the Hudson’s Bay Company were readily accepted. Colbert
indeed fitted out an expedition to the Bay which might have anticipated
the English had it ever reached its objective, and Talon sent an overland
expedition from Montreal in 1671. A young soldier, Denis de St Simon,
and an old Jesuit, Father Albanel, with Indians made their way to the
shores of the Bay and formally claimed the land for the king of France.
But when the English returned in 1672, to set up more permanent posts,
they met no French opposition and slowly and unobtrusively established
themselves on Rupert river, at Albany, and later at Nelson river. The
French, however, followed up the expedition of 1671 and were soon
trading furs on the headwaters of the rivers which ran into the Bay, and in
1674 Albanel reappeared, charged by Frontenac with the task of seducing
to their French allegiance the two coureurs upon whom the English
position depended.
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Other explorers followed, and in 1679 Louis Jolliet himself visited the
English posts. Though Frontenac was keeping a jealous eye on English
development he was commanded from France to maintain ‘ good amity’;
he was averse from supporting the Jesuits’ plans, taken up with the internal
struggles over the fur trade in Canada, and as much interested in southern
expansion as in the development to the north. The Compagnie des Indes
Occidentales had not succeeded in Canada ; in 1 674 its charter was revoked
and Canada became once more completely dependent on the Crown —
which confirmed the lack of reserves or support for expansion. As part of
a policy of maintaining the colony without military support the habitants
were to be concentrated in towns and villages and to be prevented from
wandering off in search of Indians and furs. The fur trade was often
carried on by giving spirits to the Indians, for whom brandy was an
obsession and a grave danger. When drunk the Indian was murderously
unpredictable, and from the start the Church opposed the trade in spirits;
it was condemned as a mortal sin, and in 1669 Bishop Laval uttered an
unequivocal condemnation with threat of excommunication. The secular
authorities saw the dangers of drunken and riotous Indians but could not
share in such complete condemnation, for too much of the life and trade
of Canada was at stake. The long struggle for power came to a head in
1678, when Frontenac presided over a great debate in the Assembly of
Quebec and a majority favoured freedom to trade spirits. In 1679 a com-
promise was arranged that spirits might indeed be traded to Indians in
towns and markets, where allegedly little harm was done and supervision
was effective; but none should be taken into the woods, for there trade
could not be controlled and, if the Indians got out of hand, no remedy
was available.
Even this compromise was modified by a system of congas which
permitted some coureurs to trade in the woods. In theory their number
was limited to twenty-five, and permission to trade spirits was not
explicitly included. But in practice the number of coureurs always
exceeded that of conges, and they always carried spirits. It was said that
almost the whole of Canada was involved in illicit trade, and despite
urgent commands from Colbert Frontenac did nothing effective to stop
the evasions. He was strongly suspected of participating in the trade,
argued that the only alternative was to let the furs go to the Dutch or
English, and was a personal friend of some notorious coureurs. Thus the
coureurs pushed French influence to the south and west against the policy
of the French court. They met a real need, apart from grandiose schemes
for creating a French empire; for the Iroquois were recovering and
beginning to press into the Ohio country and the Ottawa territory, with a
resultant diversion of furs to Orange and New York. To counteract
Iroquois threats and to guard the Ottawas’ route to Montreal, Frontenac
himself in 1673 took a force of 400 soldiers to Lake Ontario and there
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built Fort Frontenac. It was well-sited for its purpose, impressed the
Iroquois and prevented the Ottawas from joining the Iroquois-English
alliance. In theory. Fort Frontenac should have been supplemented
by another French post south of Lake Ontario, which would have
dominated the routes of the Iroquois trading to New York. Lacking
support from France, Frontenac built Fort Frontenac on his own re-
sponsibility, but not the southern fort, which would have been too clearly
anti-English.
He did, however, support movements among the coureurs which opened
the frontiers of Canada and presaged a threat to the English, particularly
to any English notions of expansion into the interior. La Salle had ended
his wanderings of 1669-72 without finding his way down the Mississippi,
but his activity was by no means ended. He was a fur-trader rather than a
pure explorer, anxious to develop the trade on a large scale on the Great
Lakes, the Ohio and the Mississippi. A series of posts would give to France
the right to the heart of the continent ; having made such a claim and sub-
stantiated it with forts, she must then colonise and rule. La Salle was
strongly supported by Talon and managed to work with the Iroquois,
from whom he seems to have learned the art of covering long distances on
foot, which freed him from the normal French dependence on canoes and
rivers. The revival of Iroquois ambitions and the disturbances in the fur
trade caused by war between the Iroquois and the Illinois set La Salle off
down the Mississippi. He had spent the intervening years trying to
organise transport to Lake Ontario and on to Lake Michigan by large
boats, instead of by canoes, and had secured letters patent authorising
him to discover the west, to erect forts and to enjoy a monopoly of trade
on the Mississippi for five years as long as he did not trade to Montreal.
He set out early in 1682, with a strong flotilla of canoes, which could take
him past any opposition ; in April he reached the Gulf of Mexico and took
possession in the name of the king of France. This flaunted French pre-
tensions against Spain rather than against England; but the English
colonies would be enclosed and restricted if the French founded a
defensible colony at the great river’s mouth and made the river valley
their own. Louisiana was to prove of no great value to France, but
the river valley was now known, and the search for furs was to draw
Frenchmen into the back-country behind the southern English settle-
ments.
While this southern drive presented a real threat to any English
ambitions for expansion, most of Frontenac’s support was given to a
thrust westwards by Daniel Greysolon, Sieur Dulhut, who intended to
set up a fur trade regime in the area west of Lake Superior and to control
the routes to the west, and perhaps to the Sea of the West, as La Salle
hoped to control the way to the Sea of the South. He established himself
among the Sioux of this area in 1679, but was diverted from westward
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exploration when he learned that a party of Recollet missionaries had
been taken prisoner; he went south to rescue them, and then returned to
Quebec to answer the charge that he was organising an unlicensed trade.
His move to the west of Lake Superior took him to an area where his posts
interrupted the flow of furs to New York and brought him into contact
with the Crees and Assiniboines whose furs went by way of Lake Winnipeg
or Lake Nipigon to Hudson Bay. For the moment his work was inter-
rupted, for Duchesnau as intendant, while agreeing with Frontenac’s aims,
was in sharp disagreement over the dangers of dispersing population by
connivance at the illicit fur trade (and the brandy-trade that went with it)
and responsible for accusations against Dulhut, and indeed against
Frontenac himself. Both intendant and governor, equally convinced of the
need to counter the Hudson’s Bay Company, to watch the Jesuits, to get
possession of New York and to hem in the English by control of the
Mississippi valley, were recalled to France in 1682.
This recall was unfortunate, for the Iroquois were once more reaching
for power. Although Antoine Lefebvre de La Barre, successor to Frontenac
as governor, formerly lieutenant-general in the French West Indies, had
shown strong hostility to English interests and belonged by nature and
conviction to the expansionist party, the instructions which he received
from France were dictated by fear that solid settlement might be sacrificed
to expansion, and the settlements themselves be so thinly inhabited as to
be insecure. Frontenac’s remedy had been a policy of Christianising the
Indians and intermarrying with them, so as to create a numerous and
loyal population of metis. But although metis children were already a
feature of life in Canada, they proved averse to agriculture and addicted
to hunting and wandering. The French were rightly concerned with the
consequences of dispersal, and La Barre was instructed that expansion
would be disadvantageous and that he should refuse permits for voyages
with the sole exception of La Salle’s down the Mississippi. It was clear
that the Iroquois would soon cause trouble again, that the English would
support them, and that the potential danger of the English contacts with
Hudson Bay was recognised in France.
La Barre’s first problem was to rehabilitate Quebec after the disastrous
fire of 1682. This threw him into the arms of the most energetic of the local
inhabitants, and he came to rely on Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye. He
was above all a fur merchant; he had dealings in most trades, and much of
a hand in the finances of the colony; his chief object was to make Canada
change from an overland approach to the American continent to fishing
and a maritime approach to the fur trade of Hudson Bay. The Jesuit
Albanel had been instrumental in drawing back Groseilliers and Radisson
to their French allegiance, and the plan to send a French sea-borne
expedition to Hudson Bay coincided with the debacle of the Exclusion
Bill and with the fall from power of Shaftesbury and many of those
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interested in the Hudson’s Bay Company and in the general organisation
of English colonial interests. The Company survived the political changes,
though with an almost complete change of directorate ; but French opposi-
tion grew with changing circumstances and the powerful prompting of
de la Chesnaye. In 1682 he seemed in France the establishment of a
Compagnie de la Bale d'Hudson and organised the expedition of two
French ships from Quebec, taking Radisson and Groseilliers to Nelson
river in Hudson Bay. With two such experienced men in the field the
French had a great advantage although their ships and goods were not
adequate for the task. The Hudson’s Bay Company had not yet set up a
post at Nelson river: their expedition of 1682 was anticipated by the
French, captured and absorbed, as was an interloping expedition from
Boston.
Thus the French Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson held a minute post in
the heart of the bay-side fur trade, and secured a substantial cargo of furs
largely traded for goods taken from English and New English ships. The
two countries were still at peace, and the incident at Nelson river resulted
in endless diplomatic discussion. The French challenge was serious and
might well have destroyed the English position by the Bay if it had been
continuous, or if the French could have made profitable use of the furs
thus obtained. But the prices at which furs might be bought or sold were
rigidly controlled in the (supposed) interests of the financiers who farmed
the revenues of the colony, giving a fixed revenue in return for the taxes
on the fur trade and for the exclusive right to participate in that trade.
The quantity of fur thrown into this system was limited only by the
habitants' ability to get furs. Thus prices could not fall, the French fur
market was glutted and inflexible and, attractive as the fine pelts from
Hudson Bay were to the traders, they caused great difficulties within the
colony.
The maritime approach to the Bay was, moreover, contrary to La Barre's
policy; for soon after his arrival in Canada he declared that he would not
challenge the English possession of the coastal trade, but if they advanced
their ‘noisome little forts’ into the hinterland, he would oppose them.
There was in fact no sign of such penetration by the English (and very
little talk about it either), and La Barre’s threat was part of the project
outlined by Jolliet, Frontenac and Dulhut for cutting off the Assiniboines,
the Sioux and the Crees, who would take their furs down to the Bay. The
French could go far to stifle the English trade by occupying the head-
waters of the rivers running into the Bay. This, rather than a frontal,
sea-borne attack on the English posts, was their general policy; by 1684
Dulhut was set up in the Cree territory, in correspondence with the small
French post at Nelson river and confident that he could drive the English
from the Bay without laying a finger on them.
In 1684 La Barre began sending French emissaries overland towards the
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Bay by way of Lake Nemiskau, where they were to build a post and to
intercept the trade going down to the English, as Dulhut was intercepting
it farther west. Simultaneously he allowed the organisation of a Compagnie
du Nord, an active Canadian version of the official Compagnie de la Bate
d' Hudson, which undertook a further maritime expedition to the Bay, to
reprovision and reinforce the small post which the 1682 expedition had
established. It was not a vigorous venture and met opposition of a type
which it had not expected. Colbert’s successors were anxious not to
antagonise England and not only reprimanded La Barre for his part in the
expeditions to Hudson Bay, but persuaded Radisson and Groseilliers to
return into English service and to destroy the post which they had them-
selves set up. La Barre was in equal trouble for favouring a challenge in
the west and south, where Dulhut was responsible for the establishment
of French posts to the north of Lake Superior and on Lake Nipigon, and
Michillimackinac and Detroit were developed into French posts. In
addition, many undisciplined coureurs carried European goods in
increasing quantities into the Great Lakes area and seriously disrupted
the middleman trade of the Ottawas and other tribes, who turned to ‘the
Flemings and the English of New Yorck’ for better and cheaper goods,
and to the Iroquois for support against the French.
By 1683 La Barre was convinced that the Iroquois would always be
hostile to the French and would incessantly try to starve the French fur
trade and to overthrow their posts. A preventive war had universal sup-
port in Canada, and he got together a force of 800 men and embarked on
a campaign, from which the French emerged with a peace virtually
dictated by their enemies, though he had not been defeated in open
battle. In his discomfiture he turned to Dongan as governor of New York,
asking him to arbitrate between the French and the Iroquois. Their
previous correspondence should have given La Barre ample warning that
Dongan would be hostile to French pretensions, for he claimed that the
French had no right to set up posts on Lake Erie, Lake Huron or Lake
Michigan; for him the St Lawrence and the north shore of Lake Ontario
were the boundary of Canada. He agreed to call the Iroquois to Orange,
but in a way which emphasised that they stood under his government. In
accepting this La Barre in effect renounced any French claims to suze-
rainty under the treaty concluded by Tracy with the Iroquois in 1667 and
forfeited the good will of all ranks in the colony. He and his intendant
de Meules, who had strongly supported his attack on the Iroquois, were
recalled.
La Barre was replaced in 1685 by an experienced soldier, the Marquis
de Denonville, who brought professional troops with him from France;
it was expected that he would vindicate the French position against the
Iroquois, the English of New York, and the English of Hudson Bay. Of
these projects that against Hudson Bay took shape first and had the most
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spectacular success. The Compagnie du Nord, representing the most
enterprising traders and merchants of Quebec as organised by de la
Chesnaye, obtained a grant of the trade of Nelson river for thirty years in
return for supporting a further venture to the Bay. This was to be a clear
military attack on the English posts, to be conducted overland and not by
sea. A hundred men set off from Montreal in canoes in March 1686,
commanded by a young regular soldier, the Chevalier de Troyes; but the
expedition derived its strength from the contingent of native-born
Canadian voyageurs and the leadership of three brothers of the remark-
able family of Le Moyne. When the French reached the Bay they found
the English quite unprepared, and they captured the posts and ships, one
after the other, in a series of exhilarating skirmishes. By mid-August,
when de Troyes began his journey back to Canada, the small new post at
Nelson river was the only post left in English hands and the French con-
ducted an active trade with the goods taken from the English.
England and France were formally at peace, and de Troyes had not been
instructed to capture the English posts, but only to secure the renegade
Canadian Radisson. But his real object was well known (even the
English knew the expedition was planned!) and his success was warmly
applauded. Yet in ignorance of the actual state of affairs commissioners
met in November 1686 to conclude a treaty ‘for the quieting and deter-
mining all Controversies and Disputes that have arisen or may hereafter
arise between the Subjects of both Crowns in America’. The French well
knew of de Troyes’s successes but concealed their knowledge until the
treaty was signed, for it was based on an agreement to accept the status
quo and therefore left in French hands the posts on the Bay which
de Troyes had captured. The Edict of Nantes had just been revoked,
English merchants were in grave difficulties in France, and though
James II seemed reasonably secure on his throne, his pro-Catholic and
Francophil policy was causing uneasiness; the talks preceding the treaty
were kept secret for fear that parliamentary opposition would prevent a
conclusion. When therefore it became apparent that the treaty sacrificed
the English position in Hudson Bay, resentment against James consider-
ably increased. The treaty also handed over the Indian position to the
French, for each monarch agreed to refrain from assisting the ‘wild
Indians’ with whom the other might be at war. No mention was made of
the English claim to sovereignty over the Iroquois; the effect was to allow
the French to use their troops for a full-scale punitive raid.
The French had secured the advantage, but the treaty was of little
effect. Dongan was officially tied to the English policy of pacification of
the French, but this was the period of the formation of the Dominion of
New England and of the ill-concealed preparation of a military force to
hold the French and, if desired, to overwhelm them. For Dongan an
alliance with the Iroquois was essential, for the New England Dominion
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met with great opposition from the individual colonies; and early in 1686,
while the French were making their way north to Hudson Bay, he con-
vened an assembly of the Five Nations of the Iroquois and persuaded
them that a French attack was inevitable and had best be anticipated.
Dongan himself prepared to take the French posts at Niagara and
Michillimackinac in the spring of 1687, so that at these vital points the
French would be sealed off from expansion southwards.
Denonville for his part had early realised the need to acquire New York
and was urging that James II, in his need, might sell it for French support.
But though the posts in Hudson Bay might be sacrificed New York could
not be bartered, and as it seemed probable that more and more of the furs
on which Canada depended would be pillaged or diverted to New York,
Denonville accepted the conclusion that a ‘defensive’ war was essential if
Canada was to survive. While an ostensible peace reigned, hostilities could
not long be deferred after the French had invited the Iroquois to a
banquet at Fort Frontenac, seized between twenty and fifty and sent them
as galley-slaves to France. It was a treacherous blow, but it seemed to
promise success. As Dongan knew that the French had some 1500 regular
soldiers at their disposal, whereas the English colonies were disunited and
could depend only on the reluctant support of their militia, he was
unwilling to provoke open hostilities by supporting the Iroquois. But
when Denonville assembled his troops at Lake Ontario in July 1687, sup-
ported by Canadian militiamen and the Ottawas, he found it impossible
to bring the Iroquois to battle. They retreated; he ravaged their lands and
burned their crops; but their casualties were slight, and they returned as
soon as he had gone.
Jesuit influence then induced the Iroquois to send ambassadors to
Montreal to negotiate, but the Hurons of Michillimackinac massacred
the ambassadors en route, and this was attributed to French bad faith.
The Iroquois were bent on a war of revenge. At New York Governor
Andros formally took them under English protection, some 2000 Iroquois
armed with European weapons attacked Canada, and Denonville could
do nothing but withdraw. The French outside Canada were recalled and
all departures from the colony forbidden. The French posts at Detroit,
Niagara and Frontenac were evacuated; the Iroquois demolished them
and, arrogant with victory, spread out in bands which reached to the
Atlantic and even to Florida. An appeal to France for more regular troops,
with the prospect of overthrowing the English as well as the Iroquois, met
with no response. Canada was on the defensive; governor and settlers
were in real fear, not only of the failure of their ambitions, but of actual
extermination. In August 1689 over a thousand Iroquois fell upon the
French settlers at La Chine and massacred them. Over 300 victims, men,
women and children were butchered, and terror seized the French. The
massacre of La Chine completed the work which Denonville had begun.
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At the end of a period marked by consistent plans for expansion, the
colony was reduced to a few small posts in the St Lawrence valley. The
Iroquois alliance, rather than the more grandiose Dominion of New
England, had vindicated the English tenure of the strategically sited
former Dutch posts; the danger of a ‘defensive’ policy of expansion from
Canada was for the moment over; to save Canada it was thought neces-
sary to recall Denonville and to send Frontenac out for a second term as
governor.
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CHAPTER XV
SPAIN AND HER EMPIRE
T he period between 1648 and 1688 was one of acute crisis for Spain:
demographic, economic, social, political and spiritual. In 1648 the
economic depression of the seventeenth century was in one of its
most serious phases, while by 1688 recovery was already perceptible,
especially in the eastern parts. This change, which reflected the general
European development, operated also in demography, with a rise in
population on the coasts, and stability or even decline in the interior.
This was also a period during which the outlying areas, especially
Catalonia, asserted themselves, and centralising tendencies suffered a set-
back. When the Catalan rising was put down in 1652, Philip IV (1621-65),
instead of imposing the full authority of the absolute monarchy, re-estab-
lished the special position of Catalonia. This was in accordance with the
new legalism which can be noticed in the Spanish State of Philip IV and
Charles II (1665-1700) and parallel with the demographic and economic
importance of the periphery.
In the international sphere, the Peace of Westphalia marked the collapse
of the Spanish plan for a Habsburg hegemony. Spain abdicated her
position as a great power and withdrew within herself. She was con-
cerned only with defending her colonies, and especially her own territory,
from the imperialism of Louis XIV, while Charles II’s lack of an heir
drew the covetous eyes of all western Europe towards Spain. This change
had a powerful effect on intellectual life, stimulating meditation on the
meaning of Spanish history, and rousing controversy between those who
welcomed new ideas and those who remained faithful to the spirit of the
sixteenth century.
There is insufficient evidence for a precise estimate of Spain’s popula-
tion in the period under review, and the experts disagree. Olagiie and
Ruiz Almansa believe that the figure remained at about eight million
throughout the century, while von Beloch and Earl J. Hamilton believe
that it fell by 25 per cent to about six million. But in either case, the
significant point is the contrast with the increase of the previous century,
a contrast which is equally marked in the economic field. Recent studies
indicate the recovery of Spain in the last quarter of the seventeenth
century. The lowest point of the demographic curve seems to have
coincided with the great plague of 1 648-54 which, centred in the western
Mediterranean, affected not only the eastern coasts of Spain — from
Andalusia to Roussillon — but also invaded the interior from the south
and from Aragon. Once the serious wounds inflicted by the plague were
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staunched, the population began to grow. There was a marked tendency
for the population of the coastal regions to increase, while that of the
interior declined : this was true of Catalonia as well as of Spain as a whole.
Castile, despite the damage done to Aragon and Valencia by the expulsion
of the moriscos, thus gradually lost its leading position. It is perhaps
interesting that the first pronunciamiento, or coup d'etat, of modem
Spanish history, which raised Juan Jose de Austria, Philip IV’s bastard,
to power in 1669, began in Catalonia and was supported by the kingdom
of Aragon. Not all regions of the periphery increased in population,
however: Ruiz Almansa has shown that in Galicia there was a gentle
decline in the first few decades of the century, and that this was accentu-
ated during the protracted war with Portugal.
The economic depression intensified the polarisation of society into a
privileged minority and a large number of poor people, while both law
and custom made manual labour incompatible with honour. The middle
class was rained and began to recover only with the general economic
recovery after 1680. Furthermore, the mania for nobility became even
stronger in the seventeenth century, and the Crown was lavish in its confer-
ment of patents of nobility and even of the title of Grandee of Spain, as in
the case of Valenzuela, minister at the time of Charles II. 1 At the end of
the century the duke of Osuna wrote to the king: ‘previously up to
40,000 silver pesos were paid for a Castilian title, but today Your Majesty
confers this honour on persons who pay 40,000 velldn reales ’ — that is,
one-eighth of the original sum. The clergy grew equally in numbers, some
entering the Church who had a genuine vocation, others in order to
prosper, or merely to survive. Conservative estimates put the number of
clergy about 1660 as high as 200,000. As to the poorer classes, all the
authorities agree that the number of peasants and artisans diminished
considerably, while that of rogues, vagabonds, beggars and bandits
increased: a result of the economic depression. A characteristic of
seventeenth-century Spain was the progressive concentration of property
in a few hands, those of the great landowning nobility, which, together
with the Church and the Crown, held 95 per cent of the land. Various
schemes of agrarian reform were evolved, but they had no practical result.
Earl J. Hamilton’s statistics show a serious decline in the import of
precious metals from the Indies beginning in 1621-5: early in the reign of
Philip IV, at the precise moment when the foreign policy of the count of
Olivares required large financial resources and a healthy economy. This
decline, accompanied by the exhaustion of other material resources,
helped to impoverish the country and to deprive the Crown of the assets
which had made possible so many enterprises in Europe. Thus the
monetary policy of the last Habsburgs, with the Treasury thrown out of
gear by the strain of Spanish intervention in Europe, and with no possi-
1 See below, pp. 380-1.
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bility of increased taxation, consisted in minting ever more copper coins.
This was not an exclusively Spanish phenomenon. By about 1620, when
the exhaustion of the American silver mines threatened, the days of the
silver currency were numbered, and not long afterwards — at the time of
the crisis of 1640 — silver virtually disappeared from circulation. At the
end of the century Brazilian gold restored the position of precious metals
and contributed to the recovery already referred to; but up to 1680 some
European States had to fall back on the issue of copper coins. Copper
had become the means of credit of an impoverished economy. In Spain
the inflation, interrupted by revaluations and deflations, disrupted the
economy and injured trade. The great inflationary period of vellon
(copper) covers the years 1634-56, which are those of Olivares’s ambitious
foreign policy, of the crisis of 1640, of the defeat for Spain brought by the
Peace of Westphalia, and of the continuing wars on two fronts, with
France and Portugal. The inflationary measures were particularly intense
in 1642, taking the form of a restamping, at respectively twice and three
times their nominal value, of the coins of four and two maravedis. This
led to a sharp rise in prices and to a 190 per cent increase in the premium
on silver. The result was a drastic deflation within a few months, coins of
twelve and eight maravedis being reduced to two maravedis , and those of
six and four to one. The needs of the war compelled the government in
1651 to resort once more to inflation, and this was followed by a new
deflation in the following year.
The period between 1656 and 1680 has been described as a monetary
disaster. The government took fresh inflationary measures until the Peace
of the Pyrenees (1659) ended the war with France. Then there was an
attempt to secure effective deflation by withdrawing the copper coinage,
which had not circulated at par for forty years, and replacing it with
‘strong copper’ coins. Nevertheless, inflation went on, the minting of
coins continued on a large scale, and the premium on silver rose by
another 150 per cent. In order to avert complete disaster the government
reduced to half the value of the coins issued three years before, and in
1664 the silver premium fell by 50 per cent; but between 1665 and 1680
inflation again reached dizzy heights. Unauthorised coinings and the
introduction of counterfeit money drove the silver premium up to 275 per
cent and made the drastic deflation of 1680 inevitable. This brought
wholesale prices down by 45 per cent; its seriousness can be grasped if we
remember that prices in the United States fell by only 38 per cent in the
crisis of 1929. The severity of the deflation at last introduced order into
the monetary chaos, and six years later the position could be regarded
as stable.
Earl Hamilton has provided us with a reasonably complete statistical
picture of price and wage movements during this period. It seems that the
wars of Philip IV and Charles n had only a slight effect on them. For
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example, in 1650, at the height of the French war and after many years of
incessant struggle in Europe, there was a substantial fall in prices, while
their greatest rise of the century occurred in 1663-4, a time of compara-
tive tranquillity despite the war with Portugal. The cycle of inflation and
deflation, the monetary and economic chaos, and the disproportion
between prices and wages — wages rising faster than prices — had a dis-
astrous effect. All this applies to the kingdom of Castile. In Valencia,
between 1651 and 1673, there was an appreciable fall in both wages and
prices. Wages reached the highest point of the century in 1680, fell in
1681-7, and rose again in 1689-92; while prices fell in 1689 and remained
more or less constant between 1690 and 1692. In Catalonia, we have
information only on wages, which trebled between 1640 and 1659, under
the influence of war, and became more stable in the last quarter of the
century. From the figures of prices and wages we can conclude that wages
nominally sufficed for the necessities of life in the reigns of Philip IV and
Charles II ; but the monetary chaos makes it almost impossible to estimate
their real value. Further, the continual depreciation of copper, the only
currency available to the poorer classes, whittled away their earning
capacity, while the burden of taxation seriously reduced their actual
income.
During this period the failure of the aristocracy as a ruling minority
became obvious. It had monopolised power since the revolt of the
Comuneros and Germanias was crushed at the beginning of Charles V’s
reign, and since the days of Philip III (1598-1621) the reins of govern-
ment were in the hands of royal favourites (Lerma, Olivares, Haro) who
belonged to the aristocracy; now it languished amidst the gilded magnifi-
cence of its coats-of-arms. The duke of Maura, who knew his subject
well, described the Spanish nobility of the later seventeenth century as
‘a limping, impoverished, importunate oligarchy’. There was indisputably
an increase in the numbers of the nobility in this period, as much on its
more dubious fringes (the great families augmented their property by advan-
tageous marriage alliances) as among the simple hidalgos. These constituted
a kind of proletariat among the nobility, and were — as in other western
European countries — an element of political and social instability. The
Spanish literature of the time provides ample evidence for the mania to be
a knight and an hidalgo which obsessed the country. Some have blamed
the hidalgo for his ‘wretched pride’, while others have seen him as the
embodiment of a code of idleness. After the drastic deflation of 1680, there
was a reaction against the idleness of the nobility: a royal decree stipu-
lated that the possession of factories and manufactures was compatible
with aristocratic status, provided that their owners had paid employees
to run them. We must, moreover, remember that the tax-paying citizen, who
received all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of society, had
much to gain from buying a patent of nobility. The hidalgos, in exchange
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for their exemption from tax, had to render military services. When the
urgent needs of the Crown compelled it to limit these exemptions, the
hidalgos reconciled themselves to pay general but not personal taxes and
clung to the legal fiction which exempted them from figuring in the tax
lists.
The Spanish aristocracy seemed to have reached the limit of its creative
possibilities when it assumed the direct responsibilities of power with the
system which may be described as a ‘collegiate aristocracy’: a favourite
presiding over government by the Councils. But it failed. The exaggerated
cult of honour and the pejorative implications of work, hence the abhor-
rence of saving and of using capital in productive enterprises, exercised a
fatal influence upon Spanish social life then as during earlier times. This
example spread. On the eve of the financial catastrophe of 1680 the
tratadista (social theorist) Alfonso Nunez de Castro wrote : ‘ Let London
make the finest cloths; Holland, cambric; Florence, homespun; India,
pelts; Milan, brocades; Italy and Flanders, linen... for our capital to
enjoy; for this proves only that all nations produce craftsmen for Madrid,
and that she is the Queen of Cities, since all serve her and she serves
nobody.’
The number of clergy also increased, partly as a result of the crisis
which impelled many to find in the Church a handy means of subsistence.
There were, of course, outstanding figures whose virtues left a profound
impression; but the vast increase in numbers did not mean a growth in
quality. To remedy the ills arising from this development Charles II sent a
circular to all his bishops in 1689: ‘The number of those who have taken
minor orders has recently been so great that in many villages it is hard to
find a young unmarried man who is not in orders ; many of riper years
successfully seek ordination when their wives die; and almost all do this
to enjoy exemption from the law, to live in greater freedom, to avoid
taxes, and from other worldly motives.’ Therefore he exhorted the bishops
to suspend ordinations for the time being. It is needless to emphasise the
Church’s importance in political life, especially the influence of the royal
confessors. Old religious and even political antagonisms set Dominicans
against Franciscans and Augustinians, and Jesuits against the Inquisition
and the Crown’s power. Quietism was a movement typical of a period of
religious ferment. As set out by the priest Miguel de Molinos in his
Spiritual Guide, it regarded complete passivity and internal peace as the
height of sanctity, so that the soul does not desire virtue or perfection and
no external activity is undertaken. In this state man cannot sin, even if
outwardly he appears to be sinning. Molinos carried on his activity in
Italy, but his ideas exercised their greatest influence in France, in the circle
of Madame de Guyon and Fenelon. 1
We have very little information about the Castilian merchants and
1 See above, ch. vi, p, 147.
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burghers, though the depression must have aggravated their numerical
weakness. Under the oligarchic regime, educated commoners wasted
their energies in the bureaucratic posts of the Councils without being able
to take a direct part in government, as Colbert, for example, did in France.
Olivares’s plan to replace the Grandees of Spain by commoners in posi-
tions of power had no positive result. We know more about the mercan-
tile class of Catalonia. The war with France, begun in 1635, dealt a mortal
blow to the great Catalan export trade to southern Italy ; this threat to
prosperity helps to explain the enthusiasm of the middle classes for Philip
in 1640. The war of 1635 also affected the trade of Barcelona with the
ports of Andalusia and the south-east, since French privateers were active
in these waters. The later annexation of Catalonia to France ruined the
Catalan merchants, who were incapable of resisting French competition
and economic servitude. The feeling of the great bourgeoisie in Catalonia was
strongly anti-French, and in 1652 the entry of Juan Jose de Austria into
Barcelona was hailed as liberation. Only a small minority of ‘new men’,
notably those interested in trade with Leghorn and Marseilles, were
pro-French.
After the split caused by the events of 1640-59, the unity of the Catalan
middle class was re-established and its collaboration with the monarchy
firmly assured by the intelligent efforts of Juan Jose de Austria, the first
Spanish politician to seek his main support in the eastern regions.
Between 1653 and 1697 Barcelona paid the vast sum of 6,377,591
Catalan pounds to the Crown. As far as financial co-operation was con-
cerned, Olivares’s plans had been fulfilled. The merchants contributed
decisively to the economic recovery of Catalonia in the second half of the
seventeenth century. The principality’s support for Charles II’s monarchy
went parallel with the abandonment of the economic conservatism which
had tied the Catalans to Mediterranean trade. Henceforward they began
to look towards northern Europe and America. A generation of Catalans,
led by Feliu de la Penya, stressed the necessity of work and trade and
urged the formation of a company to trade with the Indies. In 1674 the
Aragonese writer Dormer held up the Catalans as a model of industry in
Spain. Between 1680 and 1700 Seville’s trade was almost halved, while
Barcelona’s almost doubled. Besides, the Catalan textile industry bene-
fited from the free trade provisions of the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659)
since, in order to meet French, English and Dutch competition, it was
necessary to rival the products of these countries in price and quality. In
these years the foundations of the future textile industry were laid.
Conservative estimates put the figure of foreign residents in Spain about
1650 at some 150,000. A policy of religious toleration was slowly begin-
ning. The Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1630 stipulated that the religious
beliefs of English subjects resident in Spain should be respected as long as
they did not cause public offence. By the Spanish -Danish convention of
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1641, Philip IV permitted the entry of Protestants into the country.
A decree of 1679 aimed at increasing the immigration of foreign artisans
without referring to religious issues. The strongest foreign group was the
French — some 70,000 merchants, peasants (many helped to repopulate the
valley of the Ebro and the Valencian fields after the expulsion of the
moriscos), herdsmen and artisans. From the beginning of Philip IV’s
reign, the Portuguese gradually replaced the Genoese and in 1640 they
had a prosperous colony of 2000 merchants in Seville. Thanks to their
African possessions, the Portuguese had a ready supply of slaves for the
Spanish Indies. 1
The last foreigners to arrive in considerable numbers were the English
and the Dutch. After the Peace of Westphalia, in which Spain recognised
Dutch independence, the Spanish government favoured trade with
Holland, largely as a weapon against France. Its flourishing trade with
Lower Andalusia, the gateway to the Indies, contributed to the position
of Amsterdam as Europe’s chief money-market. The English were
authorised by the treaties of 1665 and 1667 to establish businesses in
Spain and to have a mercantile judge in the country. From 1648 onwards
both Dutch and English merchants appeared in the Catalan ports to buy
the spirits produced in Panades and La Maresma. In the weak state of the
Spanish economy, these foreign enterprises had a harmful effect since
they almost monopolised the American trade. The tratadistas of the time
noticed this and spoke of the wasting away of Spain. The economist
Sancho de Moncada claimed with some justice that the foreigners were
enjoying the best part of the country’s assets, were dominating private
and public finance and filling many benefices and offices.
The working class consisted of peasants and artisans, in the proportion
of about four to one; their numbers fell during this period. The position
of the peasants was very hard. The government took no effective action
against the great landowning nobility, even though some tratadistas, like
Bobadilla in his Politico de corregidores y sehores de vasallos (1649), urged
the necessity of dealing with these ‘powerful tyrants’, by whom the
peasants were completely crushed. The picture which contemporary
authors paint is a sombre one: miserable dwellings, little food, and
seigniorial oppression. The workers in the towns enjoyed a higher stan-
dard of living. The gilds lost their autonomy and were subordinated to
the power of the State. The foundation of the Junta de Comercio y Moneda
(Council of Trade and Currency) in 1679 involved the centralisation of
artisan activities, since its functions included the supervision of gilds in
their technical, economic and administrative aspects. The gild’s exclusive
and restrictive character was accentuated. But its privileges and its
enmity towards freedom of work clashed with the beginning industrial
system. In the Cortes of Calatayud (1678) an attempt was made to
1 Sec below, ch. xvi, p. 386.
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abolish the gilds altogether. Yet where money was plentiful the gilds
flourished, as shown by the foundation of the Five Great Gilds of
Madrid (which were to acquire considerable importance in the eighteenth
century).
The prevailing economic crisis at times caused poverty to reach
alarming proportions. The State reacted by fixing prices for essential
foods, but this only made things worse, since the peasants found it harder
to earn a living, abandoned the land, and swelled the numbers of the
unemployed. The clergy also tried to alleviate suffering by providing food
at monasteries; but the indiscriminate nature of this relief made begging
no longer shameful and transformed it into a lucrative business. Never-
theless, some clerics reacted intelligently to the situation : thus at Palencia
in 1664 an institution was founded which distributed food to sick work-
men and to those unable to work because of the weather.
The severe blow sustained by Spanish agriculture through the expulsion
of the moriscos (1609-14), and the subsequent slow and difficult repopula-
tion, aggravated the results of the depression. Yields were low, and land
which gave a net return of 5 per cent was considered very productive.
Smallholders were progressively ruined. The close link between the Crown
and the Mesta (the famous union of nomadic herdsmen) continued and
enabled the latter to evade the attacks of the Cortes. A decree of 1680
recalled that half a century earlier there had been several flocks of 50,000
sheep, whereas ‘now it is hard to find flocks above io,ooo\
Castilian industry was, in the period under review, in a critical condi-
tion, though there were hopeful symptoms after 1680 on account of
government action. In 1655 the cities of Toledo, Seville, Valencia,
Granada and Cordoba found it necessary to draw the king’s attention to
their plight. More than 7000 silk-looms closed down in the Toledo region
between 1663 and 1680, and by 1685 only 500 remained. The production
of woollen articles in Segovia declined similarly. In 1679 the duke of
Medinaceli created the Junta de Comercio y Moneda and ordered Spanish
envoys abroad to send technicians and craftsmen. The change which was
affecting Castilian industry was symbolised by the decline of Burgos and
the rise of Madrid, the latter being in contact with the Cadiz trade and the
large estates of Andalusia and Estremadura.
The industrial depression explains the course followed by Spain’s
foreign trade. Between 1575 and 1675 trade between Spain and the Indies
fell by 75 per cent. A French memorial of the late seventeenth century
(1691) says that of 53 to 55 million pounds of merchandise which reached
Cadiz, only 2,500,000 belonged to Spanish merchants; while 13 to 14
million were in French, 1 1 to 12 in Genoese, 10 in Dutch, 6 to 7 in English,
6 in Flemish, and 4 million in the hands of Hamburg merchants. Trading
concessions to foreign nationals were a commonplace in the treaties
signed by Spain after 1648 and were attacked by Spanish writers. For
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example, in the Avisos of Barrionuevo (October 1654) we read: 4 A witty
lampoon has lately appeared in Rome. It shows a fat cow with huge
udders, and the inscription “Spain” on its forehead. The cow is suckling
many calves, marked England, Flanders, Holland, France, Germany,
Italy.’
The Crown’s financial difficulties, leading to increasingly oppressive
taxation, are revealed in reports to the king by the President of the
Council of Castile. In 1654 Philip IV told the Cortes that of a revenue of
18 million ducats, which was collected by the Treasury, the Crown
received only half, since the other half was already pledged, and that the
debt had reached 120 million ducats. In the Cortes of 1662 it was stated
that the tax payments of Castile had risen from to over 16 million
ducats. The Crown’s revenue came, above all, from the impuestos (taxes)
of Castile and to a lesser extent from the servicios (voluntary payments)
voted by the Cortes of the kingdom of Aragon. In 1610 Aragon,
Catalonia and Valencia paid only 600,000 in servicios, and Navarre
100,000 ducats. To this must be added payments from Naples and Milan
of 1,600,000 ducats. Revenue from Sicily, Majorca and Flanders was
absorbed by the defence of those areas. Of the total revenue of 1 5,648,000
ducats in 1610, only 700,000 came from the non-Castilian kingdoms of the
peninsula, while the Castilian excise alone brought in 5,100,000 ducats.
In 1674 Castile provided over 23 million ducats out of the total revenue
of 36 million. This alone does not prove inequality of taxation since there
were also local taxes in the kingdoms. The very existence of separate
systems of taxation, however, tended to produce inequality, and this was
at the root of the struggle between Olivares and Catalonia which cul-
minated in the war of 1640-52.
Since the middle of the century, Spanish America underwent an
economic recession which had serious effects on western Europe. Finan-
cial reasons compelled the last Habsburgs to follow a ‘cheap’ policy in
America. As Cespedes del Castillo wrote, the external result of this policy
was a defensive attitude, which could not prevent certain losses, such as
that of the trade monopoly in the New World and the establishment of
foreign colonies in the Caribbean. The internal result was a decentralisa-
tion, which favoured the increasingly wealthy Creoles and which inaugu-
rated the regional differences that became national characteristics after
the Wars of Independence. About 1 660, the population of Spanish America
has been estimated at roughly 10,360,000: 3,800,000 of these in Mexico
and 1,600,000 in Peru. The large majority (perhaps 80 per cent) belonged
to the indigenous races; the rest were negroes, whites, mestizos and
mulattos, in that order. By this time, the natives who lived under effective
Spanish jurisdiction were converted to Christianity. Economic reasons
explain the partial failure of the legislation designed to protect the Indians,
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and about this time the Indian population reached its lowest ebb. The
consequent shortage of manpower had serious effects on production.
During the period under review money rather than birth largely condi-
tioned the social structure of the Indies. The old aristocracy of the
Conquest (encomenderos ) 1 disappeared and was replaced by that of the
great landowners, despite the Leyes de Indias of 1680, which forbade
amortisations and the excessive concentration of landed property. The
haciendas (plantations) flourished at the expense of the towns at a time of
economic depression and restricted trade; they were complex and largely
self-sufficient units. The leading group of Creole society consisted of their
owners ( hacendados ), of administrators, and of hidalgos, the last being
fairly numerous thanks to the extensive sale of titles by the Crown. On a
lower level were merchants and artisans. Unskilled labour was supplied
by Indians, negroes and mestizos, and slave labour was gradually giving
place to free labour. Mineral production — for instance, the mercury con-
cession at Huancavelica — took place in bad working conditions, and
humanitarian considerations clashed with economic necessity. Heavy
taxation explains the end of the old concessionary landowners of the
Conquest; in 1687 a general lien of 50 per cent was imposed on them.
Besides the Indians on the estates, there were settlements of converts, run
by the religious orders, notably those of the Jesuits in Paraguay. During
the seventeenth century the Spanish-American clergy concentrated great
wealth and property in their hands. The Jesuits and the secular clergy
became particularly numerous; many Creoles took Orders; and the
Church produced such notable figures as Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
In the government of the colonies, all posts except the most important
(that of Viceroy, for example) were sold. The rise in prices while salaries
remained stationary resulted in an increasing corruption of the bureau-
cracy and increasing trade in offices. In 1688, for example, a Creole
obtained an important post which he exchanged in Madrid for several
mayoralties at a price of between 1 500 and 4000 pesos. When he returned to
Lima he sold them for between 15,000 and 56,000 pesos. The Spanish-
American official was a businessman, who made capital out of his duties
and diverted a good part of the State revenue into his own pockets.
The position of agriculture was difficult, since the mercantilist trade
policies of the home country and the interests of the colonial producers
often conflicted with each other. The mineral yield of Spanish America
declined considerably after 1650. The Atlantic trade also suffered; after
1634 the Indies fleet no longer sailed every year. Everywhere the system
of trade monopolies was breaking down, and towards the end of the
century foreigners were the chief beneficiaries of trade between the Indies
1 Spaniards to whom the government had entrusted the control and protection of native
villages whose inhabitants had to render services to the encomendero: a system designed
to prevent the enslavement of the natives.
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and Lower Andalusia. Smuggling increased constantly ; it has been calcu-
lated that, in 1686, legitimate trade could only have supplied one-third of
the requirements of the Spanish-American market, and that the other
two-thirds must have been smuggled. From 1623 to 1655, during the
Thirty Years War and the subsequent Franco-Spanish War, English,
French and Dutch colonies were established in the Lesser Antilles and
provided excellent bases for smugglers trading with the Indian ports of the
Caribbean. After 1680 the Portuguese colony of Sacramento was a focus
of commercial penetration in the river Plate area. At the same time, any
attempt to expand the economy of Buenos Aires was (until the liberal
measures taken by Charles HI in 1778) frustrated by the monopoly
enjoyed by Lima.
The Spanish colonial system was characterised by an outlay insufficient
to secure an even and reasonable return and succumbed to foreign compe-
tition. Once command of the sea was lost, the Crown relied exclusively, as
a weapon against smuggling, on restrictive and totally ineffective legisla-
tion. Foreign interlopers could, of course, sell at much lower prices than
legitimate traders: their goods could be produced more cheaply, since the
rest of western Europe was more highly industrialised than Spain and
the level of prices was higher in Spain. More important, the interlopers
had no duty to pay and did not incur the overheads involved in the Indies
fleet. There was a constant demand for their goods and the local popula-
tion, and even the authorities, connived at their activities. The Crown
reacted by trying to close the minor trade routes, thus splitting Spanish
America into autonomous economic units (another factor which helps to
explain the course of events after the achievement of Independence). The
monopolies now breaking down were always in the hands of Castilians —
a cause of discontent to the other peninsular kingdoms. Navarre, Aragon,
the Basque Provinces and Catalonia frequently demanded a share in the
administration of, and the trade with, America. The chief obstacle seems
to have been not the Crown, but the powerful vested interests of the
businessmen and officials of Lower Andalusia. The first move to admit
these areas to a share in the benefits was not made until 1701, and really
effective steps were not taken until 1778.
The political development of Spain under the Habsburgs reflected the
same general tendencies as the economic development. There was a
change from a centralising policy — which Olivares defined in a famous
memorandum to Philip IV in 1626 and which caused the crisis of 1640 — to
one of decentralisation and return to legality under Charles II. The solu-
tion to the problem of the Spanish monarchy was delayed until the begin-
ning of the eighteenth century (Philip V’s Decretos de Nueva Planta of
1716) and was preceded by a civil war and the War of the Spanish
Succession. Spain thus constitutes an exception to the general western
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European tendency towards absolute monarchy, symbolised by Louis
XTV : Habsburg Spain showed no change in her constitutional structure,
except, of course, for the recognition of Portuguese independence in 1668.
In Catalonia, Philip IV ratified the principality’s charters and privileges in
1652 when the armies of Juan Jose de Austria occupied Barcelona. The
failure of Olivares’s centralising policy, and the pessimism which seized
Castile after the military defeats in Europe, ruled out any immediate
attempt to establish an absolute monarchy capable of imposing its will on
the autonomous institutions of the non-Castilian kingdoms. In essence
the constitutional structure which the Catholic kings gave to the monarchy
in 1479 when — except for Portugal, Navarre and Granada — they unified
the peninsula survived until the early eighteenth century.
The advocates of centralisation and of decentralisation were driven in
the years 1640-52 to adopt more extreme positions. In Castile the legacy
of Olivares’s policy, and above all the reaction to the Catalan rising,
aroused strong nationalist feelings which eventually proved to be the
catalyst of Spanish unity. In Catalonia the reaction to Olivares’s schemes
strengthened local attachment to the old statutes and privileges which,
although a guarantee of social and political security, impeded the recovery
of the principality — a recovery which was leading the Catalans to play an
increasing part in the political, and especially the economic, life of Spain.
The disasters abroad, and above all the Catalan and Portuguese risings,
led to the fall of Olivares early in 1643. Philip IV was, however, incapable
of governing himself and was strongly influenced by a nun full of virtues
and good intentions, but with little political sense, Sor Maria de Agreda.
The new favourite of the king was Olivares’s nephew, Don Luis de Haro,
who held effective power from 1643 to his death in 1661. In the last four
years of his reign Philip IV made a supreme effort to reconquer Portugal,
but failed because of the Portuguese victory at Vila Vigosa (or Montes
Claros). Not long afterwards (17 September 1665) Philip died, naming as
his successor his four-year-old son Charles; the regency was to be in the
hands of the Queen Mother, Maria Anna of Austria, who was to be
assisted by a regency council.
The regency lasted until 1675; in those ten years neither Maria Anna
nor the members of the council could do more than struggle for survival
against internal and external crises. Maria Anna handed over effective
power to her confessor, the German Jesuit Eberhard Nithard, who was
as politically incompetent as she herself. A rebellion against Nithard’s
regime was led by Juan Jose de Austria, the illegitimate son of Philip IV,
and the actress Maria Calderon, the one hope of a society which had lost
confidence in itself and longed for a Messiah. Juan Jose, unconditionally
supported by the kingdom of Aragon, overthrew Nithard, but lacked the
determination to take the reins into his own hands. A ‘palace picaro'
brogue), Fernando de Valenzuela, was given power by the regent. An
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excellent organiser of hunts and picnics, Valenzuela was able to supply the
court with the amusements which were essential if it was to forget the
state of Spain. I
In 1675 Charles II attained his majority. His reign lasted for another
twenty-five years, during which he was always ailing, several times criti-
cally ill, and subject to serious physical and psychological disturbances.
Between 1675 and the Peace of Ryswick (1697) Louis XIV maintained a
relentless pressure against Flanders and the Pyrenean frontier; while at
home there was the choice between the Messianic approach of Juan Jose
(who was saved from total failure by premature death) and the frivolity of
Valenzuela. In the background were the queens, Maria Luisa of Orleans
and later Maria Anna of Neuberg, neither of whom gave Charles II the
hoped-for heir, the French and Austrian ambassadors, courtiers and
confessors : all of them pestering the wretched king to achieve their own
ends. In this corrupt atmosphere the efforts of a few statesmen, such as
the duke of Medinaceli and the count of Oropesa, stand out all the more;
reference has already been made to the establishment of the Junta de
Comercio y Moneda and to the economic recovery which followed the
deflation of 1680. The last years of Charles IPs reign were dominated by
the question of the succession; he reached real greatness in his defence of
the Crown’s dignity and his attempt to preserve Spain’s territorial
integrity.
Out of the Congresses of Munster and Osnabruck arose the Europe of
Westphalia, replacing the conception of Austro-Spanish hegemony by
that of the balance of power. The war with France continued for another
eleven years, until the alliance between Cromwell and Mazarin compelled
Philip IV to accede to the French demands. A new Spanish defeat, in the
Battle of the Dunes (1658), led to the negotiations between Mazarin and
Haro on the Isle of Pheasants, in the mouth of the Bidasoa. After long
discussions the Peace of the Pyrenees was signed on 7 November 1659.
This safeguarded the French frontiers and split Catalonia: France
acquired Artois, Roussillon, part of Cerdagne, and a number of impor-
tant fortresses on her eastern frontiers: Gravelines, Landrecies, Le
Quesnoy, Avesnes, Philippeville, Marienburg, Thionville, and Montmedy.
Bearing in mind the Emperor Leopold’s rights to the Spanish throne,
Louis XIV married the Spanish infanta Maria Theresa, who had previously
been destined to marry an Austrian Habsburg. Although Philip IV
stipulated that Maria Theresa should renounce her rights to the Spanish
succession, this was conditional on a compensation of 500,000 gold
escudos, which the impoverished Spanish Treasury could not raise. Half
a century later this marriage was to give to the French Bourbons the
throne of Spain. The Peace of the Pyrenees also gave France considerable
trading advantages in the Spanish colonies.
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Faced with the imperialism of Louis XIV, the Spain of Charles II had
to wage constant war, while the European powers expected the dying out
of the Spanish Habsburgs and even signed secret treaties partitioning
Spain (in 1668 and 1688). In 1667 Louis XIV laid claim to the Spanish
Netherlands on behalf of his wife, Maria Theresa, invoking a principle of
Brabantine civil law as one of international law. 1 When Spain rejected the
claim, Louis began the War of Devolution, in which he was opposed by a
coalition of Spain, England, Holland and Sweden. In 1668 France
restored to Spain Franche Comtd, which her armies had occupied, but
kept some strategic points in Flanders. The Spanish plenipotentiary,
the count of Penaranda, preferred to lose these and to retain Franche
Comte, hoping to exchange this later for Roussillon and the lost part of
Cerdagne. Also in 1668, Charles II was obliged to recognise Portuguese
independence in the Treaty of Lisbon. After four years of precarious
peace, Louis XIV began a new war against Spain, the United Provinces
and the Empire. By the Peace of Nymegen (1678) Spain ceded Franche
Comte and more places in Flanders to France. These weighty territorial
losses clearly showed the catastrophic decline of Spain since the Peace of
Westphalia.
There was, however, an entirely different picture in the fields of art,
literature and learning. The Catalan philosopher Jose Ferrater Mora
believes that what set Spain apart from the rest of western Christendom at
this time was her stress on feeling, as against the prevailing rationalism of
western Europe. The contrasting attitudes were personified by Cervantes
( Don Quixote, ‘a discourse on lack of method’) and Descartes ( Discours
de la methode). The Counter-Reformation certainly exercised a profound
influence on the intellectual life, especially on Spanish literature; its
pessimism and disillusionment may have been connected with the ideo-
logical isolation of the country since the reign of Philip II, the defeats of
the Spanish armies in Europe, and Spain’s loss of her position as a great
power. The historian Claudio Sanchez Albomoz sees the Spain of
Cervantes in opposition to the Spain of Calderon, saying that in the
former reason conquers the spirit, while in the latter the roles are reversed.
Americo Castro’s thesis of a decisive Jewish and Moorish influence on the
Spanish national character is now famous. In any case, the Spain of the
code of honour and of the autos sacramentales (allegorical religious plays),
the Spain of Calderon, made its cultural preferences quite clear. Constant
wars against heretics caused the Spaniards to be preoccupied with religious
issues. This helps to explain the predominance of theology and philosophy
over experimental science, as well as the symbolism of mystical and ascetic
poetry and of Calderon’s plays. In a profoundly religious society, though
one which was quick to find an outlet for its repressed passions, collective
escapism produced mass entertainments like the theatre and the bull-
1 See above, ch. ix, p. 210.
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fight; while individual escapism retreated from the harshness of everyday
life into private piety and the highly coloured world of the plastic arts.
And when reality could no longer be kept out, biting satire and implacable
denunciation were turned on the tinsel world of Philip IV’s court, and on
the frivolous Messianism of those who, in the reign of Charles II, looked
to Juan Jose de Austria for a solution of all ills.
During the period under review literature flourished in Spain. Theology
and philosophy did not reach their sixteenth-century heights. In the pure
and experimental sciences, Spain had little to contribute. But an out-
standing figure was the philosopher Baltasar Gracidn, whose complex
philosophical novel El Criticon won fame outside Spain. Saavedra
Fajardo, Nieremburg, Ramos del Manzano and Solorzano Pereira were
notable lawyers. In economics and sociology, Sancho de Moncada and
Fernandez de Navarrete were the most eminent. In the field of history,
Solis, Melo, Nicolas Antonio, Lastanosa, Dormer, and Feliu de la Penya
were important writers. The theatre was dominated by Pedro Calderon
de la Barca, author of such diverse works as autos sacramentales. La vida
es suefio (a philosophical drama conceived on the grand scale), and
El Alcalde de Zalamea (an idealisation of religion, honour and the
monarchy). In architecture, the Baroque triumphed completely with
Jos6 Churriguera; and in sculpture, Spanish piety found interpreters of
genius. 1 This was also a great period of Spanish painting: Jose Ribera,
El Espanoleto, of refined technique; Zurbaran, the painter of religious and
mystical scenes; the pessimistic Valdes Leal; the Marian painter,
Bartolomd Esteban Murillo; and, above all, Diego Velasquez, the por-
traitist of Philip IV’s court and a master of historical painting, who
produced works of outstanding importance in the history of the visual
arts. 2 It was in these fields that Spain’s greatness survived during the
period of her decline.
In the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Spain,
under the strong leadership of Castile, played an essential part in the
formation of the modern world — economically, socially and culturally.
In the eighteenth century the outlying areas of the peninsula asserted
themselves against the backwardness of Castile, so as to share in the new
standard of living and in the enlightenment which was spreading in
Europe. Between these two periods came the time of falling population,
economic impoverishment and depression, a hardening of the social and
political arteries, and spiritual isolation, particularly strong during the
years from 1630 to 1690. Faced with the new world of capitalism and
science, Spain remained aristocratic and introspective, disregarding the
changes which were taking place in the world around her, and unable to
respond to the check inflicted upon her by the Peace of Westphalia.
1 For details of Spanish sculpture and painting, see above, ch. vn, pp. 173-4.
* For Velasquez, see vol. rv, ch. vn.
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PORTUGAL AND HER EMPIRE
I n Portugal in the second half of the seventeenth century a population
of nearly two million occupied, as it had done since the mid-thirteenth
century, an area of 34,000 square miles (55 to the square mile).
Portugal’s demographic position was thus stronger than that of Spain,
whose density of population was only about 31-4 to the square mile
(with a total of under six millions), and did not compare badly with that
of the United Provinces, whose population was not much larger than that
of Portugal. Yet, because of the injuries inflicted by war, there was no
increase of population until the end of the century. Lisbon, the capital,
had at least 165,000 inhabitants, a figure comparable to that of Amster-
dam. Four towns had between 16,000 and 20,000 inhabitants: the
university city of Coimbra, the great northern port of Oporto, and £vora,
the grain centre of the south. A newcomer to this group was Elvas, the
vital stronghold of the War of Independence. There were another thirty
towns with more than a thousand houses each, most of them in the south.
The Portuguese Empire stretched from South America to China. In the
vast territory of Brazil, which was being mapped by the bandeiras, the
population, which had increased rapidly in the first third of the seven-
teenth century, later suffered seriously from the Dutch wars and the sugar
slump and resumed a slow increase only towards the end of the century.
The most densely populated areas were the north-east, Rio de Janeiro
and Sao Paulo, the Amazon basin and the Maranhao. Europeans,
Indians and Negroes together totalled half a million, about one-fifth of
these being Europeans. The viceregal capital, Salvador (Bahia), had at
least 8000 Europeans and a large coloured population. Rio de Janeiro
was roughly the same size, while declining Olinda and growing Recife had
about 2000 Europeans each; Sao Paulo was smaller still. Cape Verde,
Guinea and Sao Tome together had some 25,000 to 30,000 inhabitants.
The population of Angola and Mozambique cannot be ascertained, but
may have been between 80,000 and 100,000. In India, Goa, fallen into
decline, had not more than 50,000 inhabitants, and in the whole of the
Far East there do not seem to have been more than 1 0,000 Portuguese.
Macao was undoubtedly the most thriving centre, notwithstanding the
loss of the Japanese trade. Here some 6000 non-Christian Chinese
rubbed shoulders with a few hundred Chinese converts and a thousand
Portuguese families.
The axis of this empire, circling the world yet peopled by fewer than
three million citizens, had been the Cape route; owing to Dutch expansion
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this was now reduced to a minor role and the Portuguese communities in
the East lived largely by trading there. Some noblemen still set out for
the East to make their fortunes: the Viceroy Luis de Mendonga, for
instance, amassed 4 to 5 million cruzados in eight years, principally in the
Mozambique trade. The trade in gold from Monomotapa grew from less
than one ton per annum at the beginning of the century to ii tons by
1667. From 1675 onwards the Portuguese tried to direct this trade
westwards and to make Mozambique the chief source of slaves for
Brazil. The ships coming from the Indian Ocean generally put in at Bahia
or another Brazilian port to load sugar and tobacco. This means that the
empire became essentially an Atlantic one, based on Africa and Brazil.
In Brazil the sugar-mill owners and the merchants repeatedly empha-
sised that the sugar- plants were the sole foundation of trade. In 1645
there were some 300 mills in Portuguese Brazil, producing some 800,000
arrobas annually. 1 Dutch Brazil had about 150 large mills, with over half
of the Portuguese output. After the final expulsion of the Dutch early in
1654 there were thus 400 to 500 sugar-mills (including a growing number
of small ones) yielding over 1,200,000 arrobas a year. Three-quarters of
them were concentrated in the area between Cape S. Roque and southern
Bahia. While this region supplied the European market with sugar, the
mills of Rio de Janeiro, though they too produced sugar, specialised in
spirits for Africa. The sugar-cane was grown on plantations worked by
slave-labour, which also supplied the manpower for the mills. This
industry, manorial and capitalist in structure, contrasted with the cultiva-
tion and manufacture of tobacco, carried on in Bahia and Pernambuco by
black and white, slave and freeman, rich and poor. With its tobacco
Brazil bought the slaves it needed in Guinea and Angola. At the same
time the consumption of tobacco in Europe and its export to the East
Indies steadily increased. The tobacco monopoly in Portugal reached a
value of 15,500 cruzados in 1638, doubled by 1642, doubled again by
1659, and continued to multiply in the following decades; 80,000 arrobas
of tobacco reached Portugal in 1666, and 128,000 by 1672. The third most
important export was Brazil wood, cut above all in the north-east; this
was a royal monopoly. The sertSo (hinterland) of Bahia, Pernambuco and
Paraiba produced ox-hides — 1 5,000 to 20,000 annually. From the extreme
north came timber for joinery and cabinet-making and for ships. The total
value of exports from Brazil to Portugal between 1654 and 1670 was 9 to
10 million cruzados a year.
The Restoration of 1640, 2 though it did not sever all links between
Brazil and Spanish America, seriously injured trade. It is true that some
small ships occasionally went to Buenos Aires; and the powerful governor
of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador Correia de Sa, had family and financial links
1 The Lisbon arroba contained about 32 English pounds.
* See voL iv, ch. xv.
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with Tucum&n, on the Potosi road. But the Dutch seized Sao Jorge da
Mina in 1637 and Luanda and Sao Tome in 1641, holding them until 1648.
Moreover, the Portuguese found it hard to provide Brazil with slaves,
since for some decades they were unable to continue their previous
practice of landing 2000 slaves a year at Buenos Aires ; and they no longer
had regular access to the Potosi road. Again, before 1640 the Portuguese
had held the asiento (monopoly) of the supply of slaves to the Spanish
Indies, and this trade was very slow in reviving.
Possession of Guinea and Angola had furnished the main link with
Spanish America, thus gaining for Portugal much-needed silver reales.
The Portuguese still held these African coasts, but from Cape Verde to
Benin their position was very precarious and under constant Dutch
pressure. The fact that they nevertheless held on was due to the supply of
tobacco from north-east Brazil and of spirits from Rio de Janeiro.
Angola, retaken in 1648, became the centre of the Brazilian slave-trade;
but the hunt for slaves now had to penetrate deep into the sertao and
became more expensive. The island of SSo Tome stagnated: its sugar was
no longer important and it lost its position in the Guinea trade with the
loss of Mina. The Portuguese of the Cape Verde Islands, like those of
Guinea, were closely connected with the negro world and the African
trade of various countries in which they served as middlemen; beyond
this, the islands played a part in the economy of the Atlantic because of
their salt, exported to Germany, England and Denmark, and occasionally
taken by the Dutch to the Antilles. Hides were the chief export to
Portugal. Yet the islands sent little salt to Brazil, although they were on
the trade route: metropolitan interests opposed this trade, but there was
a small amount of contraband.
The Azores were a port of call on the voyage home from the Spanish
Indies, Brazil and. the East Indies and were thus favoured by smugglers
and pirates. They supplied Portugal with grain, though wine was also
important; but the Portuguese government restricted the supply to Brazil
to three ships a year. Madeira was on the outward route to Brazil. Its
production of sugar declined, but that of wine rose. Once more we find
restrictions (2 to 3 ships) imposed on exports to Brazil. England and, to
a lesser extent, Holland became increasingly important purchasers of
Madeira wine.
The nerve-centre of the empire’s economy was Portugal herself, and she
adapted her economic structure to these conditions. More than three-
quarters of her land lay fallow. Grain occupied some 2,250,500 acres,
yielding about 15,000,000 bushels each year. It was thus necessary to
import (from the Azores, France, Spain, and the Baltic) 2,250,000 to
2,750,000 bushels, or 15 to 18 per cent of the national consumption. It
was the mills of Portugal which supplied the Brazilian and African
colonists with high-quality flour. The cultivation of vines, olives, fruit
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and vegetables accounted for over 1,500,000 acres and grew with the
demand from the colonial and foreign markets. About 1675 northern
Portugal alone exported 30,000 pipes of wine. More important, this was
the period when port was first produced; in 1678 408 pipes of port went
to England. Further, in addition to the traditional exports to northern
Europe of figs, raisins and almonds, from 1635 (when Dom Francisco
Mascarenhas brought the Chinese variety to Lisbon) orange groves began
to transform the coastal region of central Portugal; forty years later the
export of oranges to England alone was worth 50,000 cruzados. France
bought the same quantity, and Holland and the rest of northern Europe
half the amount. Meeting the demand from colonial and northern
European markets, olive plantations were spreading; this was all the more
necessary since the battles of the War of Independence had devastated the
olive groves of Alentejo.
The most significant export, however, was salt, especially from the Sado
basin. In 1657 80,000 to 90,000 muids were exported; 1 in 1669 the treaty
with Holland reckoned on a minimum of 107,000, worth 321 ,000 cruzados.
Holland was by far the largest purchaser, accounting for four-fifths of the
total. Apart from salt production, industry was on a very small scale.
Portuguese fishermen had been ejected from the Newfoundland Banks,
and the cod which was the staple diet of a large part of the people had to
be bought from English fishermen. Shipbuilding, on the other hand,
revived after the Restoration, with shipyards at Lisbon, Oporto, Pernam-
buco, Bahia, Rio and, for small ships, the Azores; but the oak and hemp
used came from Danzig and Riga, and the Dutch were the chief suppliers
of anchors, sails and cannon. Portuguese dependence on foreign sources
was equally great in textiles.
Exports to Brazil, Africa and the islands comprised wine, spirits, oil,
flour, salt and, to some extent, cloth and linen, produced at home, as well
as fabrics, paper and metal goods received from other countries. At
Lisbon, Oporto, Setubal and Faro, ships setting out for European ports
loaded Portuguese wine, oil, fruit, salt, sumac, Spanish wool, diamonds and
drugs from the East, sugar, tobacco and wood from Brazil, and hides from
several colonies. Thanks to her sugar and' tobacco, Portugal was able to
acquire from Spain wool for re-export, com, and above all the silver which
enabled her to balance her trade and constituted the bulk of her coinage.
The movement of prices varied with different commodities, but the
general tendency was one of stabilisation or a barely perceptible rise up
to 1666-8; thereafter, com, salt and olive oil held firm, while colonial
products fell sharply during the recession from 1668 to about 1690. The
basic difference between the two periods was clearly caused by a transition
from war to peace. There is, however, another aspect to consider: if we
express prices in terms of silver, there is first of all stability and then a
1 The Lisbon muid (moio) contained about 23 bushels.
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general fall, assuming dramatic proportions in colonial products. Monetary
policy, then, acted as a brake on the fall in prices. In the late 1630's
Portugal lost her two sources of gold, Mina and Arguin, to the Dutch,
while Brazil and Mozambique were not yet effective sources of supply.
Thus the currency depended on imports and during the period under
review gold coins were scarce and silver plentiful; copper played only a
minor part. The Portuguese financial system was closely linked to the
Spanish. Fortunately for Portugal, the balance of trade was on the whole
in her favour, sugar and tobacco balancing Spanish com and wool; and
the foreigners who sold their goods in southern Spain for Spanish coins
paid with them for their Portuguese salt.
The international setting of the economy of the Portuguese Empire had
changed profoundly since the end of the sixteenth century. The Dutch
and English East India Companies had reduced the Portuguese carrying
trade by the Cape route to less than a third of its previous size. Govern-
ment and commercial circles realised that they were not equipped to face
the competition of these great companies, and that State capitalism and
the activities of individual traders had to be replaced by this new form of
enterprise. Gomes Solis was its champion in oriental trade, but his
company lasted only from 1628 to 1632. After the Restoration it was
above all the Jesuit Vieira who urged the same policy for the Brazilian
trade. The heavy losses of 1647 and 1648 — an official, though perhaps
exaggerated, report gives the losses as 108 ships in the first year and 141
in the second, out of a total of 300 — led King John IV to create the
Brazilian Trading Company, with a capital of 1,255,000 cruzados. The
essential steps were taken in February 1649: immunity was conferred on
the property of the New Christians sentenced by the Inquisition, and the
administration of confiscated property transferred from the Holy Office to
the Conselho da Fazenda (Financial Council). The company was granted
the monopolies of exporting wine, olive oil, flour and cod to Brazil. Two
squadrons, each of eighteen warships, were to be created and maintained,
and a proper convoy system was to be organised between Portugal and
Brazil. This was financed by duties on sugar, tobacco, hides and cotton,
together with insurance and freight-charges on the warships. The company
had some of the features of the limited company, grouping some of the
strongest Portuguese trading houses — such as that of Duarte da Silva, the
most powerful financier of the Restoration — with foreign, especially
Italian, capitalists.
The company encountered strong and violent resistance. On the one
hand, it threatened the prosperity of small ports by concentrating capital
and trade in a few ports, thus impoverishing the provincial towns. On
the other hand, the anti-capitalist, and to some extent anti -bourgeois,
mentality of a society built round the aristocracy and moulded by the
ideology of the Counter-Reformation and by hostility to the New
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Christians, favoured the prerogatives of the Inquisition. Merchants were
often, rightly or wrongly, accused of Judaism, and a hard-pressed and
short-sighted State aimed at the confiscation of their goods. In May 1658
the export monopoly in the four commodities was ended, though com-
pensation was paid to the company. In January 1659 the regent acceded
to the demands of the Councils and the Cdrtes : the Ministry of Finance
was authorised to make use of the property of the sentenced New
Christians, and in February the immunity which this property had enjoyed
was lifted. The days of the company were numbered and in 1663 it was
transformed into a royal council, with compensation for the shareholders.
Despite the accusations levelled at it — i n sufficient convoys, inadequate
supplies to Brazil — it had saved Luso-Brazilian trade at a time of great
dangers. Once the danger was over, small ports and small firms saw their
opportunities return.
December 1640 saw the restoration of the Portuguese throne, usurped
in 1580 by Philip n and unlawfully retained by Philip HI and Philip IV, to
the only legitimate dynasty, whose rights were not diminished by the
passage of time. It represented also a return to a legitimate system of
State and government, ending the Spanish tyranny. An abundant politico-
legal literature sprang up to prove the legitimacy of the Restoration, to
secure recognition from foreign powers, and to establish the authority of
the new regime at home. In the Cdrtes of 1641 an official doctrine was
formulated which was defined and developed in the Consulta of the
Council of State of 1656: if power derives from God through the people
as intermediary, the kingdom transfers full power and authority to the
king. This is definitely a pact: it commits the subjects to obedience while
the king rules justly and grants to the king the right to enforce obedience;
on the other hand, it compels the king to respect natural law and the rules
and customs of the country and permits revolt against tyranny or usurpa-
tion, the country being entitled in such cases to put a new king on the
throne. Thus in 1640 a usurping tyrant was expelled and the rightful
wielder of power restored. Significantly the Duke of Braganza was
solemnly acclaimed king and took the oath before the Cdrtes met, whereas
in 1385 the Cdrtes had elected a king, the throne being vacant; from 1580
to 1640 it was not vacant but usurped, and the Portuguese restored the
government that had existed before 1580.
New taxes could not be levied without the approval of the Cdrtes,
specially convened; the heir to the throne had to take the oath during a
session of the Cortes', they had to decide doubtful cases of succession, and
the king had to consult them in grave matters of State, vital to the national
interest. The Cdrtes had not met between 1620 and the Restoration, and
only four times during the whole period of Spanish rule. Between 1641
and 1688, however, they met eight times, always in Lisbon, playing an
important part in the reorganisation which followed the Restoration. Yet,
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even before the union of the Crowns, the role of the Cdrtes had become
far less important than in the Middle Ages (only seven sessions between
1500 and 1580). It was thus a State already absolute, with a hereditary
monarchy and a bureaucratic machinery, which was restored in 1640,
though better organised thanks to the administrative improvements under
Spanish rule. The Cdrtes consisted of representatives of the three Estates
who met separately : the great lords and landed nobility ; the archbishops,
bishops and prelates; and two deputies each from 92 cidades and vilas
(large and small towns). These deputies were elected by a meeting of the
municipality consisting of fidalgos (noblemen), magistrates, citizens,
representatives of the gilds (Casa dos Vinte e Quatro), the municipal
judge, 1 etc. ; nobles and ecclesiastical dignitaries were often chosen as urban
deputies.
The role of the Cdrtes being irregular and limited, Restoration Portugal
oscillated between two forms of government: government by the Councils
and High Courts, with the king restricted to appointing their members
and to a very general guidance and supervision, and government by the
king and his secretaries, with the Councils and High Courts as cogs in
the administrative machine. There was, strictly speaking, no ministerial
government, the functions of ministers being discharged by secretaries of
state, Vedores da Fazenda (Superintendents of Finance), and presidents
of Councils and High Courts. During periods of personal rule by the
monarch these functions were discharged by some favourite secretaries and
councillors, and in either case an important part was played by the royal
Despacho, those who took documents to the king for signature.
The Secretariat of State, dating from the sixteenth century, controlled
the broad lines of domestic, colonial and foreign policy, and the armed
forces. At the end of 1643 the king separated it from the Secretariat of
merces e expediente (which dealt with the appointment of officials, officers
and magistrates up to a certain rank) and from the Secretariat da assinatura
(dealing with the signature of documents coming from any Council). The
secretary of state ensured continuity in government: Vieira da Silva, for
instance, held the post from 1642 to 1662. But the head of the govern-
ment was either a minister favoured by the king, or, as from 1662 to 1667,
the escrivdo da puridade (confidential secretary), a post revived by the
count of Castelo Melhor and abolished on his banishment.
The Council of State, founded in 1569 and continuing the old King’s
Council, was clearly the supreme organ, deciding the issues of war and
peace, and making the highest civil and military — and, in practice,
ecclesiastical — appointments. The great lords had the title of councillor
even when they did not perform the duties. Among the members we find
dukes, marquises, counts, archbishops and bishops, but hardly ever magi-
strates or other commoners.
1 The municipal judges (juizes do povo) were elected by the property-owners.
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The Council of War was established in December 1640 and received its
statutes three years later. All the councillors of state had the right to
attend, but the regular members were the military governors of the
provinces, important commanders, generals of artillery, the commander
of the fleet, the viceroy of Brazil, and two judges of the Supreme Court,
with a secretary. This Council appointed the officers of the army and navy,
supervised fortifications, naval armaments, munition depots, foundries
and hospitals, and was responsible for the general conduct of war.
The Council of Finance ( Conselho da Fazenda ) directed the financial,
economic and mercantile administration. It was headed by the three
Vedores (Superintendents), all noblemen, representing specific interests.
It consisted of three to five legally trained councillors, a Procurator
Fiscal, and four secretaries. Subordinate to this council were the Court
of Accounts, the Casa da India, the mint, civil shipyards and depots, con-
sulates, the customs and other branches of the revenue, and the Brazilian
Trading Company with its successor, the Junta do Comercio do Brasil.
Since the war against Spain required new financial efforts, and since the
Cortes of 1641 and 1642 wished to maintain control of supply, the Junta
dos Tres Estados was established, in January 1643, as a permanent organ
representing nobility, clergy and towns. This had the task of fixing and
repartitioning war taxation and of supervising the financial administra-
tion of the war. Its scope gradually broadened, taking in some sectors of
commerce; but its original functions were slowly reduced to control of the
less important taxes.
Also in 1643, the Colonial Council replaced the Council for India.
Under a noble president it comprised six councillors (two noblemen and
four lawyers), a secretary and two clerks. It was concerned with the
government of all overseas possessions (excepting the administration of
justice), the organisation of the merchant fleet, and colonial mercantile
policy, except where Brazil was concerned.
Justice was the exclusive concern of the Desembargo do Pago, the
Supreme Court originally presided over by the king, but since the late
sixteenth century by a great noble, and composed of six desembargadores
(judges), one of whom was an ecclesiastic, assisted by secretaries, clerks
and a treasurer. The desembargadores enjoyed the status of fidalgo. This
court nominated all higher magistrates and legal officials, could revoke
certain decrees, resolved conflicts of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction,
granted or refused appeals, decided on pardons, regulated livings, entails
and privileges, and had to approve the briefs of papal nuncios. The
Chancellery was subordinated to it. Below the Desembargo was the
Lisbon Casa de Suplicagao e Relag&o, the Court of Appeal for all civil and
criminal cases in southern and central Portugal; cases in the north came
before the Oporto Casa do Civel e Relacao , though some were reserved for
Lisbon. The Mesa da Consciencia e Ordens administered the Military
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Orders and was consulted by the king on matters of conscience, such as
the property of those condemned by the Inquisition.
Thus the machinery of State was firmly in the hands of the great
nobility, the high clergy and the judges. Between the monarch and the
people stood a bureaucracy well organised in the essential branches of
war, justice and finance. But this structure embraced the remnants of
feudalism and local rights: on the one hand, Commanders of Military
Orders and those who had in their gift lands, revenues and appointments;
on the other, the camaras (municipalities) with their judges, and elective
village judges. It was, however, the landed proprietors and merchants
with a certain income who made up the camaras, and in the large towns
these were presided over by a nobleman. Elections were triennial. In the
chief towns the representation of gilds was organised in the Casa dos
Vinte e Quatro which, subordinated to the Senate of the camara, was
responsible for the economic administration and for the upkeep and
policing of public places.
The annexation of Portugal by Philip II had been made possible by the
benefits which noblemen and merchants expected to receive (silver from
Mexico and Peru and the supply of slaves to the Spanish Indies); these
classes were divorced from the ordinary people who favoured resistance.
The economic and financial crisis of the empire which began in 1620-5,
the new international situation, the centralised government which
threatened privileges and careers — all this changed the attitude of nobles
and merchants; but it was the pressure from below, the popular risings
provoked by hunger and oppressive taxation, which drove them to revolt.
The makers of the Restoration wanted to keep control of the situation
and therefore sought popular approval only after the event. Some of them
had taken part in suppressing the revolts of 1637: for example, Vieira da
Silva, secretary of state from 1642 to 1662. Certain sections of the aristo-
cracy, the higher clergy and the merchants remained attached to the dual
monarchy and made several attempts to reunite the two countries.
Reunion meant for them a strong combination against the new naval
powers, American silver as a basis for the currency, a Spanish outlet for
sugar and tobacco, the re-export of Spanish wool, the profits of the asiento
and profitable trade between Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Further,
there were many family ties with Spain. Leading Portuguese remained in
Spanish service: Dom Francisco de Melo, the victor of Hannecourt
(though defeated at Rocroi) ; Dom Felipe da Silva, the victor of La Motte;
Gregorio de Brito, the defender of Lerida. All this caused a political
ambiguity among the ruling classes.
The Portuguese hoped that the Restoration would bring them peace
with Holland and consequently the restitution of some lost territories.
What in fact happened was a truce in Europe and continued fighting over-
seas. Thus Portugal had to wage two wars: one at sea against the Dutch
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East and West India Companies, for the control of colonies and trade,
from 1625 to 1661; and the other on land, against Spain, from 1640 to
1668. In order to carry on the Spanish war, Portugal needed good rela-
tions with the United Provinces, since that country was the main market
for salt and Portugal’s chief supplier of naval stores, masts, cannon and
wheat. The Dutch, in their turn, could not do without salt for their fish, and
Spanish wool came to them through Portugal. There was thus a mutually
profitable truce in Europe, but this did not apply overseas. In the East,
despite the accord of 1635 between the English East India Company and
Portugal, the Dutch gained the advantage; the Cape route ceased to be the
axis of the Portuguese Empire. In the Atlantic, however, the Portuguese
won the upper hand. Angola and Sao Tome, taken by the Dutch in 1641,
were regained in 1648 ; and this decided the fate of Brazil, since the source
of its slaves was now in Portuguese hands. The Dutch had to evacuate the
Maranhao in 1644 after a revolt by Portuguese and natives which lasted
eighteen months, and they never managed to control Bahia. In fact, their
tranquil domination of the north-east (conquered 1630-5) lasted for only
ten years. Pernambuco rebelled in 1645, and Haus was defeated at
Tabocas by Fernandes Vieira. Guerrilla warfare began and help came
from Portugal. In March 1648 Vieira and Negreiros won the first battle
of Guararapes, and the reinforcements brought by Francisco Barreto
secured the second victory in February 1649. Since the creation of the
Brazilian Trading Company merchant ships enjoyed safe passage between
Portugal and Brazil. In January 1654 the Dutch in Brazil capitulated.
What caused their defeat? The Anglo-Dutch War of 1652-4 certainly
hampered them; yet Portugal too was at war with England, from 1650 to
1654. Portuguese diplomacy secured some delay in the sending of Dutch
reinforcements, but the fundamental reason for the inadequate help given
to the Dutch in Brazil was the clash of interests in Holland between the
West India Company and the salt and wool merchants. The central
government was weak, and the decisive voice was that of Amsterdam,
which preferred trade to colonisation. Moreover, demographic factors
favoured Portugal, and the Dutch army in Brazil contained a high pro-
portion of mercenaries. Finally, there was the spontaneous and fierce
resistance of the Portuguese settlers and natives to Dutch domination.
Portugal was at the same time at war with Spain. Until the Peace of the
Pyrenees (1659) Spain could not employ all her strength; but Portugal at
the Restoration had neither a system of fortifications nor a modern army,
she lacked generals (some of whom were serving in Catalonia or Flanders),
and even the army’s stud-farms had been closed by the Spaniards. This
was a frontier war, with attacks on villages, seizure and recapture of live-
stock and crops, devastation of fields and olive groves. During this
twenty years’ struggle, however, Portugal became a network of fortifica-
tions and raised an army capable of winning pitched battles and led by
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able officers. Matias de Albuquerque, inspired by Rocroi, defeated Baron
de Molinguen in the battle of Montijo (May 1644) and then defended
Elvas against a strong army led by the Marquis of Torrecusa. Olivenga
was defended with equal success against the Marquis of Leganes in 1648.
Heavy fighting, however, was resumed only at the time of the Franco-
Spanish negotiations, for Portugal hoped to be included in the peace
settlement. After a Portuguese defeat before Badajoz and the loss of
Olivenga and Moura, Dom Sancho Manuel and the count of Cantanhede
won a striking victory at the Lines of Elvas (January 1659) over the
Spanish favourite, Don Luis de Haro. In the War of Independence the
field army numbered 4000 to 5000 cavalry, 10,000 to 15,000 infantry, and
a score of cannon. Portugal was generally on the defensive: she aimed at
recognition of her independence, not at conquest.
Her situation was indeed extremely difficult, abroad as well as at home.
The Holy See stubbornly refused recognition. For twenty years no power '
helped Portugal, and she was not allowed to participate in international
treaties. To France she was only a pawn in the struggle with Spain.
Threatened by internal and external dangers, the king and the govern-
ment vacillated and sometimes favoured desperate policies. They wished
at one time, against the opposition of the Councils and High Courts, to
cede north-eastern Brazil to the Dutch in exchange for silver, and at
another considered abandoning the home country to the Spaniards and
falling back on the colonies. The hard-pressed government created fresh
difficulties for itself : its absolutist ideology led it to support the Royalists
in the English Civil War, and this quixotic policy culminated in an open
challenge to Cromwell in 1650. Blake intercepted the Brazil fleet, and in
1654 Portugal was forced to accept Cromwell’s terms, opening her empire
to English trade. The consequences of this policy continued after the
English Restoration. The marriage of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II
(May 1662), although it brought English support for Portugal, cost two
million cruzados and confirmed England’s privileged trading position (the
present of Tangier and Bombay had only secondary importance).
Expelled from Brazil and Angola, the Dutch, seeing the advantages won
by England, attacked Portugal in the autumn of 1657, blockaded the
Tagus with forty ships for three months, and in August 1661 secured a
peace treaty which had a disastrous effect on the Portuguese economy.
In return for their recognition of Portuguese ownership of Brazil, Angola
and Sao Tome (which was in any case firmly established), the Dutch
received four million cruzados (to be paid out of the proceeds of the salt
trade) and the same trading privileges as the English.
1661 was the nadir of Portuguese power, and the domestic situation
helps to explain this. John IV at first ruled in collaboration with the
Cortes and the Councils; he then dispensed with the Cortes and worked
with the Councils through his ministers; and finally turned to personal
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rule through his secretaries, especially Pais Viegas, who had been his
secretary since before the Restoration. John IV’s death in November 1656
created a delicate dynastic position, since his eldest son, Dom Teodosio,
had died in 1653, and the second son, Dom Afonso, was physically and
mentally weak. There was thus a body of opinion which wished to sum-
mon the Cortes so as to proclaim the incapacity of Afonso and the
accession of his brother Pedro. The Queen Mother, Luisa, favoured this
solution, but dared not take the decisive step. The majority of the aristo-
cracy and the leading clergy were only too pleased with the prospect of a
long regency under a woman, followed by the reign of a king incapable of
ruling. They held the real power from 1656 to June 1662, exercising it
legally through the Councils and High Courts which they dominated.
Despite the victory of the Lines of Elvas, foreign affairs took a disastrous
turn : Portugal was excluded from the Peace of the Pyrenees, the war with
Spain continued, and the English marriage and the Dutch treaty put the
economy of the empire under the control of foreigners.
The regency should have ended in 1657, Afonso being then 14 years
old; but Dona Luisa prolonged her rule, hoping for Afonso’s recovery or,
preferably, for a chance to put Pedro on the throne. The failure of her
attempts to strengthen the monarchy was due to her reliance on those very
sections of the ruling classes which opposed changes in general policy and
in methods of government. Thus the resounding defeats suffered by the
existing policies and the unprecedented gravity of the situation led those
who wanted a change to rely on Afonso, and in 1662 the count of
Castelo Melhor was driven to transfer power from the queen mother to
the king. Sousa de Macedo became secretary of state, and government
by a ministry was imposed on the Councils and High Courts.
Profiting from the hostility of England (whose trade was suffering) to
\he Dutch treaty, Portugal postponed ratification until 1663, and actual
payment until the new treaty of 1669. There was also an attempt to prevent
the English from establishing themselves in the colonies. Castelo Melhor
tried to use France in order to secure an advantageous peace with Spain,
without being drawn too closely into French schemes. In 1661-2 the
Spanish general offensive was halted; but in 1663 Spain, freed from other
commitments, made a supreme effort, and in May Evora was taken. The
reorganisation of Portugal’s army and fortifications had, however, made
great progress since Turenne had sent Schomberg with 600 French officers
and men, followed later by some English regiments. In June 1663 Dom
Sancho Manuel and Pedro de Magalhaes won the battle of Ameixial and
retook Evora : the reward of twenty years’ preparation and of the firmness
of the new government.
As Spain would not accept a treaty advantageous to Portugal, and as
England, who was mediating, wanted a quick settlement at any price,
Castelo Melhor signed in March 1667 a treaty of alliance with France.
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The peace party and English diplomacy aimed at his fall, and — seemingly
paradoxically — so did French diplomacy. The French realised that he
wanted their alliance only as a means of bringing pressure to bear upon
Spain, and that he would not co-operate with Louis XIV who wanted
above all to oust the notoriously Anglophil secretary, Sousa de Macedo.
At home, the ruling classes disliked the substitution of a ministry for
government by Councils, since their power was diminished. The people,
too, were dissatisfied because of the hardships of war. Castelo Melhor’s
power was not in fact as extensive as was believed : foreign envoys noticed
that, through lack of decisive and informed support, his good intentions
were not always carried out and that he was unable to resist the high
nobility, especially the Marquis of Marialva who opposed him in the
Councils. By his extreme legalism in 1662, which suited his rise to power,
Castelo Melhor had delayed solving the problem of the succession. The
majority of the nation would not resign itself to keeping an impotent
madman as king, since this might cause a grave, perhaps fatal, crisis if
Pedro were to die before his elder brother.
While apparently hostile, but in fact complementary forces united
against Castelo Melhor, a romance developed between Dom Pedro and
the young and beautiful queen, Marie Franchise of Savoy, daughter of the
due de Nemours, who had married the unfortunate Afonso in 1666 and
doubtless wanted to rule as well as to reign. In September 1667 Dom
Pedro and his partisans succeeded in achieving the dismissal of Castelo
Melhor, who fled to a monastery and later escaped to England. Then the
queen took refuge in a convent from where she began a suit for the
annulment of her marriage. On the ground that he was incapable of
having issue Afonso was prevailed upon by his brother and the Council
of State to resign the Crown and was at once virtually imprisoned (which
he remained until his death in 1683). The marriage was then annulled since
it had never been consummated ; four days later Pedro, who took the title
of Prince Regent, and Marie of Savoy were married by proxy. In January
1668 the Cortes declared Pedro prince and heir to the throne, while con-
firming the removal of Afonso because he was unable to govern and to
produce issue. These events averted a war of succession in Portugal. On
the debit side, the change led to a hurried peace with Spain in February
1668 and a treaty with Holland in 1669, confirming that of 1661. The
triumph of the peace party was a rebuff for France, the fall of Sousa de
Macedo and the marriage of Pedro a rebuff for England. The queen did
not rule, nor did Pedro. As Saint Romain wrote in 1670, the government
of Portugal was now in the hands of the fidalgos : they had achieved their
purpose.
After the Restoration, Portugal itself was in fact much more aristo-
cratic in government than were the colonies. It was certainly true that the
people complained and sometimes intervened. In February 1641 some
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ten fidalgos fled to Spain: riots broke out against the nobility, but they
were quietened by the suppression of the aristocratic conspiracy in July.
In July 1657 the government’s conduct of the war seemed equivocal, and
the municipal judge and deputies of the gilds of Lisbon went to the
French embassy to affirm Portuguese friendship for France and to accuse
some of the ministers of being pro-Spanish. When fivora surrendered to
the Spaniards in May 1663, the people of Lisbon took possession of the
streets and demonstrated violently, thus helping the government of
Castelo Melhor. In 1667 the Lisbon judge, the Senate of the camara and
the gilds played a far from negligible part in the fall of Macedo and
Castelo Melhor : it seems that the people wanted to put Pedro at the head
of the government and assure the succession, without deposing and exiling
Afonso, but they were outmanoeuvred by the nobility. In April 1672 the
Lisbon gilds openly threatened the fidalgos with violence if they were
drawn into Anglo-French intrigues, the judge again playing a political
and diplomatic part.
Overseas, however, the camaras had more influence than at home. It
was the people of Tangier who in 1643 rebelled against the governor (who
was still loyal to Spain), replaced him and recognised Jo hn IV. It was the
people of the Maranhao who in 1642 began the revolt which ultimately
forced the Dutch to withdraw. At Sao Paulo and Santos the Jesuits were
expelled and the central authorities defied. In November 1660 the people
of Rio rebelled against the powerful Correias de Sa and were subdued only
in the following April, at which time S3o Luis and Belem rose against the
Jesuits and expelled them. In Goa in 1652 a popular rising led to the
expulsion of the viceroy, the count of Obidos, and the people of Bombay
delayed for some years the handing over of the town to England.
Thus in Restoration Portugal the government was in the hands of the
fidalgos and of the higher clergy, who in any case formed one social class.
The French consul noted in 1665 that the Church was extremely power-
ful, and in 1669 an Italian observed that the power of the Jesuits was
abnormally great. Yet, in face of the political ambiguity of the ruling
classes, it was the solidarity of the ordinary people, expressed by municipal
judges, camaras and gilds (even though the Cortes did not allow them to
intervene at the highest level) which sustained Portuguese independence
by their threats and their actions.
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CHAPTER XVII
EUROPE AND ASIA
I. THE EUROPEAN CONNECTION WITH ASIA
I n the sixteenth century the Portuguese changed the course of the
Asian trade with Europe, but did not significantly alter its content;
they broke in upon the profitable port-to-port trade in the East, but
did not fundamentally alter its pattern. From the end of that century their
Dutch and English competitors more radically rearranged the Asian
carrying trade, promoting the sale of Bengal silk in Japan and of Javanese
sugar in Persia. They also put more Asian wares upon the European
market, supplementing Malabar with Sumatran pepper, introducing
indigo and sugar, opening a trade in that useful ballast commodity,
saltpetre. The Portuguese had found coarse Indian cottons saleable in
Africa and their Brazilian colonies; the newcomers found such cottons
suitable for Europe — plain for sheets, towels and napkins, coloured for
hangings, quilts and furnishing fabrics.
A still more dramatic expansion in the flow of Asian goods to Europe
took place after 1650. Pepper and spices shared in that expansion, though
they no longer dominated the sales in Amsterdam and London. Saltpetre
continued to be important because in Bihar were found new sources of
supply, capable of meeting the demand caused by the growing scale and
intensity of war in Europe. A similar discovery, that of cheap raw silk in
Bengal, also came to be exploited, as a succession of able Mughal
governors progressively cleared the province of Arakanese and Portu-
guese pirates. The supply of Persian raw silk to north Italy and France
had been partially diverted by the Dutch and English in the 1630’s; the
arrival of cheaper silk from Bengal further upset the old pattern. The
cheaper and more plentiful supply, together with the influx of skilled
refugees and the temporary protection caused by war in Italy, fostered the
growth of a considerable English silk industry. As Sir Josiah Child boasted
in 1681, the East India Company had ‘of late years found out a way of
bringing raw silk of all sorts into this kingdom, cheaper than it can be
offered in Turkey, France, Spain, Italy, or any place where it is made’.
Sugar from Bengal and Java had seemed promising, but, like indigo,
could not compete with West Indian production; but two new items in
the trade between Asia and Europe, coffee and tea, did succeed. These
two drugs, specifics respectively against sermon-time somnolence, and
against corpulence and the vapours, became in time popular drinks as
supplies increased and prices fell. In the 1660’s the Dutch and English
each bought twenty thousand pounds of coffee a year, one item in a
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wider Red Sea trade. By the turn of the century the English, French 1 and
Dutch between them imported three million pounds of coffee, the trade
was so important that their agents went up to the Yemen hills prepared to
pay cash down, and special coffee ships sailed direct from Mocha for
Europe. The fall in price and consequent rise in popularity of tea was a
slower business; but by 1700 English imports from China reached a
hundred tons a year, and the future importance of the East India Com-
pany’s trade with China was already foreshadowed.
The popularity of the new drinks curbed drunkenness and led to new
social institutions. Dozens of coffee-houses sprang up in Amsterdam;
they became a London institution, informal clubs; and in Paris, complete
with mirrors, candelabras and marble-topped tables, a recognised
meeting-place for wits and writers. Coffee-houses, such as Lloyd’s in
Lombard Street, served as gathering points for merchant and shipper,
where information could be collected and buyer introduced to seller.
They also served as political centres where workmen and businessmen
read their daily news. 2 The newspaper owed some of its power as a
popular educator to the coffee-house in which it was read and discussed.
Addison’s hope was, through the Spectator, to bring philosophy ‘to dwell
in clubs, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses’.
The most startling development, however, followed from the realisation
that Indian cottons, so long the dress of Asians from the Red Sea to the
Moluccas, might also clothe Europeans. In the early seventeenth century
cottons were used to cover African slaves, European walls and furniture,
and, ‘among those who could not go to the price of linen and yet were
willing to imitate the rich’, the English dead. In the latter half of the
century Defoe noted a great change :
the general fancy of the people runs upon East India goods to that degree that the
chints and painted calicoes, which before were only made use of for carpets, quilts,
etc., and to clothe children and ordinary people, became now the dress of our ladies,
. . .the chints were advanced from lying upon their floors to their backs, from the
footcloth to the petticoat. Nor was this all, but it crept into our houses, our closets
and our bedchambers, curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last beds themselves, were
nothing but calicoes or Indian stuffs 3
Shirts, neckcloths, cuffs and handkerchiefs were of Indian cotton or silk,
ruffles of muslin, stockings of cotton instead of silk or wool.
Nor was the fashion confined to England, though the English East
India Company, with its narrower base in Asia and more limited choice
of commodities than the Dutch, was the first to push sales at home. There
was a European craze for things Indian : not only for Coromandel painted
cottons or Gujerati brocades as high fashion fabrics, but for cottons whose
washability and cheapness made them generally attractive. Here was
1 The Compagnie des Indes Orientates had been formed in 1664.
* See above, ch. xm, p. 322. 8 Weekly Review, 31 January 1708.
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another commodity, like sugar or tobacco, or tea at a slightly later date,
which by its cheapness unlocked great new sources of demand. It was a
situation which the companies proceeded to exploit. The English
directors were soon ordering large quantities of cheap calicoes, and sail-
cloth and long cloth shifts, ‘to be strongly and substantially sewed for
poor people’s wear’. Calicoes became the common wear of country folk,
of servants, and of the families of middling tradesmen.
The change was reflected in the import figures. Dutch imports rose
from 55,000 pieces in 1650 to some 200,000 pieces in the mid-i68o’s;
English imports, in the same period, from less than 100,000 to the boom
figure of over 2,000,000. Further supplies were imported by the French,
Danes and Portuguese, and from 1715 the Ostend East India Company
actively purchased silks and cottons. Since the Dutch and English were
large re-exporters of textiles — London Custom House records testify to an
active trade to Spain, Germany, Italy, and the American colonies — the
health and comfort of many people benefited considerably, for cheap
cottons permitted a change of washable ‘linen’ on the person and on
the bed.
Companies which imported textiles in such quantities— at the Rouen
sales of 1686 textiles made 1,562,000 of the total of 1,713,000 livres —
were obviously competing with the woollen, silk and linen industries of
Europe, and were to suffer in varying degree from their hostility. In the
United Provinces the imports of calicoes for local use were for a long time
quite small ; but an awareness of the profits made by the English gradually
overcame all hostility. In France, where East India interests were weak
and Louvois was busy fostering the textile industries, a ban was imposed
in 1686 upon oriental silks and Indian printed cottons, as well as upon
Indian calicoes printed in France. The barrier thus erected against the
flood of Asian textiles required constant strengthening by new orders and
edicts. The penalties imposed grew ever more severe; at^Valence seventy-
seven persons were sentenced to be hanged, fifty-eight to be broken on the
wheel , six hundred and thirty-one to be sent to the galleys. Yet the use of
printed calicoes continued to be widespread. The decisive effect of the ban
was to cripple the French calico-printing industry, to the eventual advan-
tage of the British cotton manufacturer. As for plain cottons — calicoes
for tuckers, neckcloths or coverlets, muslins for the headdresses, kerchiefs
and aprons of the Midi — these the Compagrtie des Indes Orientates was
allowed to import, though prohibitive duties were laid upon imports from
England and the United Provinces. Because of smuggling even white
cottons were banned in 1691, and the company was only permitted to
import them again, under temporary permits, if they received a govern-
ment stamp.
In England, where trade and industry were more evenly matched, it
took twenty-five years from the Gloucestershire clothiers petition of 1675
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to secure an Act against Asian textiles. During those years a varied
opposition was mustered. The Turkey Company attacked the East India
Company because Bengal silk competed with Persian. The silk weavers
attacked the company, though it was the supplier of their raw silk, because
it had encouraged a rapid expansion of silk weaving in Bengal, which
brought down the price of Indian silks by 50 per cent within forty years.
(The company had sent out English throwsters, dyers and pattern
drawers to improve Indian silks.) The woollen manufacturers and the
calico dyers and printers likewise resisted the invasion of their markets.
A first Bill to restrain the weariry; of Indian silks and calico and calicoes
printed in England passed the Commons in 1696. It was killed in the
Lords by the counter-pressure of all those who handled or worked up the
cottons and silks. A second measure also failed, and in 1697 a Spitalfields
mob attacked the East India House and rioted outside the House of
Commons. Rioting and a pamphlet war continued until, in April 1700, an
Act was passed forbidding the use of ‘all wrought silks, Bengalis, and
stuffs mixed with silk or herba, of the manufacture of Persia, China or
East India, and all calicoes painted, dyed, printed or stained there’. The
Act differed in two ways from the French ban; it permitted imports of
printed fabrics to be re-exported out of bond, and it permitted both the
importation of plain calicoes and their printing in England. Since in the
following session the duty on calico was also reduced, one result of the
Act was to stimulate the English printing industry; nor in the event was
the trade in silks and printed calicoes seriously affected. Some two-thirds
of these had always been re-exported, and quite a number continued to
find their way on to the English market. In 1719 David Clayton noted that
calicoes were cheaper retail in coastal districts than they were wholesale
in London. As the competition of Indian and English printed calicoes
thus remained formidable, the next attack was directed against cotton as
such. In 1720, after many petitions and riots an Act was accordingly
passed ‘ . . .prohibiting the use and wear of all printed, painted, stained or
dyed calicoes except such as are the growth and manufacture of Great
Britain and Ireland’.
One feature of the protracted struggle against the new commodity had
been the long pamphlet war — a war in which the whole trade with the
East had been under fire. The opposition to that trade was general, for it
offended against almost every canon of bulfionist, mercantilist or protec-
tionist policy. A French memorial of 1686 stated the charge; Asian trade,
instead of providing a market for French manufactures, and a return in
money, swallowed infinite quantities of gold and silver, furnishing in
return nothing but miserable piece-goods which, moreover, were ousting
such good French manufactures as silks and woollens.
The denunciation of the drain of precious metals was not new; but
changing trade patterns were making the problem more acute. Coffee
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had to be bought for cash. Fewer piece-goods were bought in Gujarat
where there was a Mughal market for European goods, and more in
eastern India where few European goods were taken in exchange. It
became harder to extract gold for Coromandel, copper and silver for
Bengal from the Asian port-to-port trade. Less gold and silver, drawn
ultimately from the overland trade in silk and cottons, was coming from
the Persian Gulf and Gujarat. Copper could normally be procured in
Japan; but Japan stopped the important silver exports in 1668, and those
of gold in 1685-6. By 1700 even the Dutch had to raise their modest
exports of gold and silver to five million florins.
Against the ‘ bullionists ’, defenders of the East India trade used several
arguments. The French directors declared that what they did not buy
cheaply in Asia would have to be bought dear in Europe, and claimed that
their re-exports recovered more than the original outlay of bullion;
Seignelay told Louis XIV that all the company’s bullion came from Cadiz
in return for sales in Spain. But even if this were true of individual
countries, it was not true of Europe as a whole. Not only was there no
world-wide system of credit, so that money was needed to link several
continental credit systems; but as Pieter de la Court stated in 1662, in his
Het Interest van Holland, the trade with Persia, India and China could not
be conducted by an exchange of goods and services, but only by exporting
gold and silver. For until the Industrial Revolution there were no goods
and few services which Asia would take in quantity from Europe.
But the trade with Asia not only exhausted Europe’s treasure, it took
away her people’s work. That was what made the new trade in manu-
factures — textiles, chinaware or fans — so objectionable: it was contrary
to the mercantilist stress upon production as opposed to consumption,
upon exports as opposed to imports. In answering this attack the East
India defence had to formulate arguments for ‘free trade’. Child and
Davenant stressed the value of buying in the cheapest market — as the
linen-drapers put it, ‘Free Trade makes all manner of commodities cheap;
the cheapness of our commodities empowers our people to work cheaper;
the cheapness of work encourages foreign trade, and foreign trade brings
wealth and people’. 1 The Considerations upon the East India Trade, which
appeared in 1701, anticipated that competition would foster the invention
of labour-saving machinery, which, by cutting costs, would widen markets
and increase production to the point where a further division of labour
would again cut costs. But even arguments as advanced as these were of
no avail when unemployment rose in the 1690’s. When the woollen and
landed interests seemed at stake there was little hope for calicoes, ‘made
the Lord knows where by a parcel ofijieathen and pagans that worship the
devil and work for a half-penny a day’. 2 The old belief in the central
1 An Answer to Mr Carey's Reply (1697).
* The Female Manufacturers’ Complaint (1720).
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importance of the woollen manufactures triumphed over the pleas of the
East India interest.
Yet woollens, which in 1640 had formed between 80 and 90 per cent of
London exports, in 1700 amounted to less than 50 per cent. By 1700
re-exports of Asian and American goods constituted some 30 per cent
of the total export trade of England, and there were also the invisible
exports of inter-port trading in the Indies. England was committed to the
re-export and carrying trade almost as firmly as Holland. The interest of
overseas and colonial trade had become a national interest, to be provided
for in peace treaties, to be defended by force in Europe.
The marked change in the pattern of trade with Asia in the second half
of the seventeenth century, which led to such notable argument, was
mainly the work of the Dutch and the English. They had risen to a pre-
dominant position in trade and in military power; they had eclipsed the
Portuguese and overshadowed the Spaniards. No similar change, how-
ever, took place in Christian missionary activity in Asia. Neither the
Dutch nor the English showed an interest in spreading Protestant
Christianity at all commensurate with their power in the East. The blows
to Spanish and Portuguese commerce were blows to the mission work
which that commerce sustained, but German , Italian and French mis-
sionaries did much to repair the damage. To its close the seventeenth
century in Asia was predominantly Roman Catholic. For the Dutch and
English advance was made not by governments, but by trading companies,
for whom an attack on Asiatic religions spelt loss of trade. By contrast,
the Roman Catholic missions were often vigorously supported by the
French, Spanish and Portuguese Crowns, which in India and the Philip-
pines placed considerable revenues at the disposal of the Church. In
Europe Protestants, engaged in acrimonious controversy or subservient to
indifferent princes, were not interested in providing an administration for
foreign missions. The instruments of the Counter-Reformation, on the
other hand, were also missionary agencies. Dominicans, Franciscans and
Augustinians had worked in Asia since the opening of the sea-routes.
The Capuchins, Theatines and Jesuits soon extended their activities over-
seas. Protestant missionary societies of comparable quality and vigour
did not appear until the eighteenth century. Nor were there any Protestant
parallels to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide as a training and directive
centre for missions, or even to the Societe des Missions etrangeres founded
in Paris in 1658. Nor could Protestants have anything to compare with
the ecclesiastical organisation — with its wealth of churches and seminaries,
of universities, hospitals, libraries and printing presses — built up by
Portugal and Spain during one hundred and fifty years. The Abbe Carre
in 1672, from the house of the Portuguese Augustinians at Kung in the
Persian Gulf, the Capuchin mission at Surat, the Recollects church at
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Daman, the pretty Mahim church served by an Indian secular, the
Dominican church at Bassein, the Jesuit college at Thana, the Carmelite
house at Goa, right to the Theatines at Bicholim, everywhere found
centres of Catholic communities. While crossing India he saw churches at
Golconda, and on the east coast Jesuits at San Thome and Capuchins at
Madras ; on the Dutch-held Malabar coast, from Quilon northwards, he
found numerous Catholic communities under the care of Jesuit fathers or
Indian priests. Other travellers furnish similar accounts of all the areas to
which the power of Spain and Portugal had extended — or to which their
nationals had penetrated as private traders, mercenaries or freebooters.
Under these circumstances the Dutch, while recognising their duty of
preaching to the heathen, tended to be principally concerned with winning
over Catholic native converts to the Reformed Faith; for the existence of
strong Catholic communities linked by language and religion to the
Portuguese constituted a political threat to Dutch supremacy no less than
an affront to the true faith. Theirs was a large task. In western and
northern Ceylon whole communities had accepted Catholicism, and
almost every village had its church and school, supported by considerable
land revenues. In Malabar, besides the churches established by the
Portuguese, some forty-seven of the Syrian churches followed Catholic
doctrine. The first step was to banish all Roman Catholic priests from
Dutch possessions and to impose heavy penalties for harbouring them.
But many continued their work from refuges in Kandy and Madura,
while from Goa the Oratorian Joseph Vaz organised a mission to Ceylon.
The second step was to prohibit the use of the Portuguese language and
to order the people to learn Dutch. But as late as the 1730’s a Dutch
commander in Malabar complained, ‘what can the zeal of a reformed
preacher, whom nobody can understand, do to combat the bustle of a
thousand Roman priests on this coast who are perfectly equipped with the
necessary knowledge of the language?’ 1 Until the nineteenth century
English officials in Ceylon still learnt Portuguese; until the twentieth
century Indian Christians in Calicut used Portuguese for their devotions.
The Dutch were successful only where they used the indigenous
languages — Tamil or Sinhalese and, farther east, Malay — or adapted
Portuguese works to their own purposes. They made a drive, using
intensive catechising in the numerous schools, to instil Protestant beliefs
in the children, though home influences undid much of this work. They
also restricted government employment and licences to trade to adherents
of the Reformed Faith, and put special pressure on such groups as the
Muslims whose religion and economic competition made them particu-
larly obnoxious. But, as in Holland* the commercial value of tolerance
often prevailed over Calvinist zeal. The Dutch East India Company,
indeed, showed itself determined not to allow its preachers to create a
1 P. C. Afexander, The Dutch in Malabar (Annamalainagar, 1946), p. 181.
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Calvinist Church with influence and Ihterests of its own. No centralised
mission administration, no church supervision of the schools, no direct
communication with the Church in Holland was permitted. Preachers, it
was made clear, were individuals employed by the company. And once
the immediate military threat from the Portuguese had waned, not only
were Italian Carmelites admitted to Dutch territory, but Portuguese
Jesuits as well.
The English, with little territory and a Portuguese alliance, 1 had less
need of a missionary effort than the Dutch. They appointed ministers to
their factories, but did little to promote Christianity among the natives.
The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.) was formed
in 1699 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts (S.P.G.) in 1701 ; but it was not until the latter half of the eighteenth
century that any very notable British missionary work was done in Asia.
The first true Protestant mission in Asia was the Danish Lutheran
mission at Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast. This was started in 1706
by Pliitschau and Ziegenbalg, who came out, not to minister to the
Danish factory and garrison (though they did), but to convert the heathen.
They took pains to master Portuguese, and Ziegenbalg became proficient
in Tamil. Both were prepared to spend their lives in Asia. They had
studied at the German Pietist centre, Halle, and it was through A. H.
Francke at Halle that their work became well known. He had a wide
correspondence, published their letters in the Halle Reports, and used the
interest which they created to secure funds for the mission. Many now
familiar methods were elaborated : mission boxes, house-to-house collec-
tions, the mission lecture. English interest was aroused through Bohme,
the Lutheran chaplain of George of Denmark, Queen Anne’s husband,
and support was given to Tranquebar by the S.P.C.K. The first appeals
for a more concerted Protestant missionary effort thus had some measure
of success and important later mission work was foreshadowed.
The main new Christian effort in Asia, however, came not from the
Protestant countries, but from France, Italy and Catholic Germany. In
India Italian Carmelites established missions in the Deccan, and in China
Italian Franciscans worked in Shansi, Shensi, Honan, Hupeh and Hunan.
In 1 660 three members of the Societe des Missions etrangeres, who had been
appointed vicars-apostolic in China, Tonkin and Annam, were driven by
war and weather to Ayudhya, the capital of Siam. They realised its
advantages as a centre for their society and proceeded over the next
twenty-five years to build a church, a substantial seminary and several
mission schools with a hospital and dispensary attached. Their contacts
with Phaulkon, the powerful Greek adventurer at the Siamese court, led
Louis XIV, in the hope of the king’s conversion and of profitable trade, to
exchange embassies with Siam and to dispatch a military expedition. The
1 See above, ch. xvi, p. 394, and below, p. 419.
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death of the king and the fall of Phaulkon in 1688 ended the French and
Jesuit connection with Siam, though the Societe des Missions etrangeres
long continued to make Siam its main centre in the East. Some members
of the Societe went on to China, but the main French effort in that country
came from the Jesuits who were sent out by Louis XIV. Five Jesuits
chosen for their scientific attainments reached Peking in 1688 and were
well received by the emperor, if rather coolly by their Portuguese col-
leagues. They were soon strongly reinforced and in succeeding years
played a most important part as exponents of European science in China
and as interpreters of China to Europe.
There was also a redeployment of forces by Spain and Portugal. When
in 1614 the missionaries were expelled from Japan, the Portuguese
Jesuits — and a number of their Japanese converts — moved to Tonkin and
Cochin-China, where they established considerable missions and became
court mathematicians. The Dominicans and Franciscans later joined the
Jesuits or found new fields in the coastal provinces of China. Other
missionaries displaced by the Dutch capture of Malacca passed first to
Macassar, and then to Solor, Flores and Timor, where Dominicans and
their converts successfully resisted a number of Dutch attacks. Bamabites
worked in Burma, while the Theatines made Borneo their particular care.
All this was not achieved without conflict. French and Italian participa-
tion was made difficult by the existence of papal grants to the Crowns of
Spain and Portugal. Both had shouldered responsibility for the mainten-
ance of the Church and the extension of the faith in Asia. In return they
had been granted extensive privileges which, in effect, extended into Asia
the absolute control which the two rulers exercised over their national
Churches. To the rights of Padroado and Patronato real Portugal and
Spain jealously clung, whatever the strain imposed on their diminished
resources, and however much the extent of their claims exceeded the
political and commercial control which they could exercise over the
countries of Asia. There had been disputes enough between the ecclesi-
astical authorities in Goa and Manila; but discord was multiplied and
sharpened when non-Iberian missions appeared in the East. French
missions were regarded as threats to political and commercial as well as to
ecclesiastical monopolies. The establishment of the Congregatio de Propa-
ganda Fide in 1622 and the dispatch of vicars-apostolic to Asia were
considered to be attacks upon the royal control of the Churches of Spain
and Portugal. Accordingly, the Spanish and Portuguese rulers exerted
what pressure they could on Rome, did what they could to prevent
ecclesiastical ‘interlopers’ from reaching Asia, and tried to curtail the
effectiveness of those who arrived.
One Portuguese viceroy, Jo&o Nunes da Cunha, baldly announced in
1668 that he would hang any bishop who came to the East without
Portuguese royal approval. On account of this attitude the three members
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of the Socidte des Missions et range res, who in 1658 were appointed vicars-
apostolic in China, Tonkin and Annam, thought it best to use the
difficult overland route to the East which avoided areas under Portuguese
control. In 1673 Pope Clement X signed a brief exempting vicars-apostolic
from the jurisdiction of the archbishop and the Inquisition of Goa. An
attempt was thereupon made to bargain with Rome: Portuguese recogni-
tion of the spiritual authority of the vicars-apostolic was offered, provided
they were not French. The fear was plainly expressed that otherwise the
French would become ‘masters of the trade by reason of the ties which are
necessarily formed between those who embrace the Catholic faith and
those who announce it to them’. No compromise was reached, and the
Papal Legate Charles Maillard de Toumon, who entered Portuguese
Macao in 1717, was placed under house arrest on orders from Goa, from
which only death released him.
These questions of jurisdiction were further complicated by rivalries
between the Orders. For the Philippines the Spanish Crown early laid
down the rule, one Order, one district, and even then did not escape
disputes. Jesuits complained about friars from Manila who, ignoring
royal orders, entered their province of Japan and later followed them to
China. In Bengal the Augustinians protested when the Jesuits opened a
mission there. The regulars were united, however, in opposing the
building-up of an indigenous, secular clergy and the establishment of the
ordinary process of episcopal supervision and visitation. The founders of
the Societe des Missions etrangeres were convinced that only when the
parish clergy were seculars and, like their bishops, of local stock, would
the Church in Asia take real root and achieve a vigorous life of its own.
They further believed that such a clergy must be created by seculars since
regulars would always keep them in subordination to their Orders. This
certainly was the case in the Philippines, where neither the demands of the
archbishops nor the commands of the Crown could make the regulars
transfer the settled parishes to the care of the secular clergy, though the
two Philippine universities turned out many qualified men. The Societe, at
its central headquarters in Siam, trained a number of native priests for
Siam and the adjacent States. A Chinese was created vicar-apostolic and
later bishop of Nanking. In India an Oratorian of Brahmin stock was
similarly appointed vicar-apostolic in Bijapur; but such appointments
were rare and caused much friction. Considerable racial intolerance was,
in fact, displayed by the European-manned and European-directed
Orders. There were strict rules against the admission of half-castes. The
Augustinian Fr Gaspar voiced the belief that Filipinos, and most other
Asians, were an inferior lot, except the Japanese, ‘who, as Gracian wisely
remarked, are the Spaniards of Asia’. 1 But the fiercest attacks were
1 J. J. Delgado, Historia general sacro-profana, politico y natural de las islas del Poniente
Uamadas Filipinas (Madrid, 1892), pp. 273-93.
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reserved for the Jesuits’ methods. They were criticised for attempting to
secure that influence in high places in Asia which they so often wielded in
Europe. They were accused of using such influence against other Orders
and of furthering their commercial interests. There were some reasonable
grounds for criticism. The Jesuits maintained a mission at the Mughal
court and hoped that the friendship of Father Busi with Dara Shikoh, in
whom Sufi mysticism seemed to reach out towards similar trends in
Hinduism and Christianity, would bring success to their North Indian
mission. In China a similar policy appeared patently rewarding. Not only
did the Jesuits force an entry into a country long closed to the missionary,
but they rose to eminent positions in the service of the Chinese State.
They even managed the awkward transition from the service of the Mings
to that of the Manchus with the greatest tact. In 1692 the Emperor
K’ang-hsi publicly proclaimed his appreciation of their official services
and toleration for their religion. But the costs of such a policy were high.
Christianity became tied to the fortunes of an individual ruler or a
dynasty; in India the defeat of Dara Shikoh in 1658 at the hands of
Aurangzeb, an uncompromisingly devout Muslim, ushered in a period of
rapid decay for the North Indian mission. In Japan the Jesuit concentra-
tion upon the nobility had aroused political suspicion in the Shogun in a
way that the humbler activities of the friars never did. In China, as in
India, many of the ablest missionaries were condemned to live as courtiers,
astronomers, gun-founders, map-makers, even as painters or musicians.
In particular, the ambiguous status of those Jesuits who became civil
servants of the Manchus was open to criticism. The Jesuits themselves were
divided. In 1655 their Roman College condemned the acceptance of the
office of reviser of the imperial calendar by Father Schaal; and although in
1664 Pope Alexander VII permitted SchaaPs successors to work in the
Board of Astronomy, the position of missionaries working on a calendar,
the final function of which was astrological, was never a happy one.
Other aspects of the Jesuit approach caused even more bitter contro-
versy. They had early felt the need to study the languages and civilisations
of the East, and the schoolmasters of Europe proved apt pupils in Asia.
Their learning made them good courtiers, their understanding of Asian
societies made them aware of the strength of social forces. In South India
de Nobili and his successors in the Madura mission realised the power of
caste, and the association in Indian minds of Christianity with low caste.
The meat-eating, hard-drinking, blustering habits of the Portuguese
marked them as low caste, even if they had not usually married low-caste
women. That association the Jesuits tried to break by cutting themselves
off from the Portuguese on the coast, and by living the life of respected
sanyasis, with due attention to such points as vegetarianism and ritual
cleanliness. Their adoption of a manner of life so closely adapted to Hindu
concepts of what was proper in a religious teacher, and so closely modelled
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in externals upon Hindu social customs, early brought charges of heresy
against them. In 1704 de Toumon, legatus a latere to the Indies and
China, condemned the Jesuit methods.
In China, too, the Jesuits sought outwardly to conform to the behaviour
expected of a teacher or sage, though there they found that it was learning
rather than asceticism which commanded respect. They stressed the con-
cordance between the teachings of Christianity and those of the orthodox
master Confucius whose works they indefatigably translated. They
allowed their converts to continue to participate in the ceremonies con-
nected with the honouring of Confucius and of the ancestors. Such an
attitude was the very opposite of that of the Dominicans, whose uncom-
promising declaration that the rites were idolatrous led to their temporary
expulsion from China. The Societe des Missions etrangeres took a similar
stand, warning its members in its Monita ad Missionaries (1669) against
sacrificing Christian doctrine to ease the way of the heathen.
The conflict was carried to Europe. Dominicans and Jesuits in turn laid
their interpretations of the Chinese rites before the pope. The Jansenists
entered the fray. Pontchateau bitterly attacked the suiting of Christian
doctrine to Chinese habits of mind. Of the Jesuits he said: ‘they have in
no wise announced to China Jesus Christ poor and crucified. They have
taken it ill that the Dominicans place in their church, on the altar, the
image of Christ crucified because, they say, the Chinese regard it with
disgust,’ The Jesuits countered by securing from the Emperor K’ang-hsi
in 1699 a declaration that the cults of the ancestors and Confucius were
as purely civil in their nature as the Jesuits claimed. But a pagan emperor’s
decision could hardly be allowed to be final. In 1703 de Toumon was sent
out to investigate and in 1707, having decided that the rites were idola-
trous, he condemned them. Though Chinese hostility had been aroused,
and was later to result in the suppression and persecution of Christianity,
the Legate’s condemnation was reinforced in 1715 by the Bull Ex ilia die
and by the imposition upon all missionaries of an oath of obedience to
the unequivocal provisions of the Bull.
The preaching of the Gospel in Asia provoked rivalries and conflicts
over the Malabar and Chinese rites which, though at first waged within
the Church, were eventually submitted, in a spate of publications, to the
judgement of the general public. But the connection with the East also
had less portentous by-products. There was a fruitful influx of new
materials, new techniques, new designs, and new forms of art. If the tea
trade with China was eventually to lead to an Opium War, its immediate
effect was to encourage the use of porcelain cups and teapots, admired
alike for their material and for their design. A single East Indiaman in
1700 brought home 146,748 pieces of chinaware — including those porce-
lain figurines and vases for which Queen Mary had developed a taste
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during her residence at The Hague. And when Meissen triumphed in
1710 — producing a genuine European porcelain where Venice, and Delft
with its blue and white ware, had failed — it continued to use the motifs
made popular by China and Japan.
If ‘china’ became Europeanised, so did lacquer ware. French court
inventories and cargo lists reveal the importation of lacquered chests and
tables, dishes and fan sticks on a considerable scale. But by the end of the
century there were do-it-yourself manuals on sale, and from Birmingham
and Paris came excellent wares ‘lacquered after the manner of Japan’
with typical flower and bird designs.
The introduction of oriental textiles also led to the acceptance in
Europe of new colour-schemes and designs. The grave full colours
originally asked for gave way to brighter colours as the European eye
adapted itself to them, and the dress chintzes and silks came to be admired
for their novel oriental flavour. During the boom years of the 1680’s the
rule for English agents was to obtain ‘ whatever is new, gaudy or unusual’.
The delight in the ‘ rambling fancies of the country ’ was largely reserved,
however, for dress fabrics. For other textiles, the companies preferred to
adapt traditional Indian designs to European taste. (The Dutch factor
Daniel Havart considered that Coromandel craftsmen were too stupid to
do anything but copy.) In 1677 ‘patterns in ruled paper for directing the
weavers’ accompanied English orders for branched velvets from Bengal,
and there was a constant interchange of samples and patterns between
India and western Europe.
The demands of the European markets thus produced changes of style
which sometimes, as with Chinese porcelain, permanently affected the
taste of the producer. The interchange could be very complicated. The
embroidery designs of English crewel-work bed-hangings were long
thought to have been taken from Indian fabrics. But it has been suggested
that the English provided the patterns for the Indian fabrics, and that their
oriental flavour was derived from an earlier period of Chinese influence in
Europe. 1 Thus when in the eighteenth century patterns were sent from
India for imitation in China, the Canton artisan was possibly offered his
own twice-transmuted and unrecognisable designs.
The taste for things oriental was also seen in the pagoda towers, pro-
jecting eaves and pavilion-like plan of some European buildings.
Internally houses might be furnished with imitations of Chinese wall-
papers, externally with gardens bearing traces of Chinese and Japanese
theories of garden design, as described by Le Comte or Kaempfer and
admired by Addison. In those gardens might well be found such trees and
shrubs, introduced from Asia, as the Aleppo pine and the white mulberry,
the lilac and the hibiscus.
1 See John Irwin, 'Origins of the “Oriental Style” in English Decorative Art’, Burlington
Magazine, xcvn (April 1955).
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Other introductions of the period were perhaps more useful than
aesthetically appealing: the castor-oil plant, the wild senna, tamarind,
sarsaparilla, aloe and round-podded cassia. Whether useful or beautiful,
they were part of that veritable flood of new plants which so stimulated
botanical studies in Europe. Between 1678 and 1703 there appeared at
Amsterdam the twelve-volume Hortus Malabaricus of Governor H. A.
van Rheede tot Drakenstein — 1794 plates of flowers, fruits and seeds,
drawn full size by Indian artists. At the same time Paul Hermann, first
physician to the Dutch East India Company, was having drawings made
of the flora of Ceylon and was annually sending home the herbarium
material, plants and seeds, which he was to grow and to examine for pos-
sible medical properties when he became director of the botanical gardens
of Leiden University. G. E. Rumphius, who served the Dutch in the
East from 1652 to 1701, prepared the materials for the monumental
Herbarium Amboinense published after his death; 1 and the German doctor
and botanist Kaempfer used his stay in the Dutch factory on Deshima
island in Nagasaki harbour to explore the flora of Japan. The botanical
works produced in Holland were the finest of their day, but there were
keen botanists at work from all over Europe. Tournefort, in charge of the
Jardin du Roi (now the Jardin des Plantes) in Paris made notable expedi-
tions to the Middle East and discovered, while climbing Mount Ararat,
that altitude had the same effect as latitude upon the distribution of plant
species. James Petiver, using material collected at his direction, contri-
buted several accounts of the flora of Madras to the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society.
Nor was the work done only by gifted amateurs. The Dutch East India
Company regularly had material sent home from Batavia to the labora-
tories and physic gardens of Holland. Members of the French Academie
des Sciences jointly produced a great history of plants. Such growing
collections of botanical material intensified the search for a scientific basis
of classification, which — after the discovery of the sexuality of flowers by
R. J. Camerarius and the application of comparative anatomy to botany
by Malpighi of Bologna — was first provided by Linnaeus. Similar effects
can be observed in zoology. The opening of Asia to the collector and
observer provided a tremendous stimulus. Private individuals and great
companies brought home strange beasts or collected eggs, skeletons and
skins. Evelyn, for example, in 1681 asked travellers to report their dis-
coveries to the Royal Society; ‘the particulars they collect are animals and
insects of all sorts’. Lynx and deer from Mughal India were kept in
St James’s Park; pelicans, Indian geese and Malayan cassowaries were
housed in Birdcage Walk. The menagerie at Versailles supplied the
elephant and other exotic animals which Perrault dissected and classified
according to the new science of comparative anatomy.
1 Het Amboinsehe Kruid-Boek . . . Herbarium Amboinense, 7 parts (Amsterdam, 1 741 -55).
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Notable advances were also made in geography. The collection and
collation of nautical data, as practised by the Spaniards and Portuguese,
was taken up by the Dutch East India Company. Their cartographer at
Amsterdam provided charts to pilots and corrected them in the light of
their experiences. Pilots at Batavia sent home their observations Test
what many by long industry have collected be lost’. The Academie Royale
des Sciences, a creation of Colbert, from which he expected practical
benefits as well as purely scientific results, sent out geographical expedi-
tions whose findings were published in 1693. 1 In England the Royal
Society got the Master of Trinity House to issue printed requests to ships’
captains for geographical, meteorological and astronomical data. In such
ways did the hopes of co-operative research of Bacon and Descartes find
fulfilment.
Those parts of Asia which lay upon the main trade routes came to be
well recorded; but little purely scientific exploration was undertaken. The
Pacific, outside the narrow belt of trade winds used by the Manila galleon
on its run to and from Acapulco, remained unexplored. The closing of
Japan in 1638 to all but the closely guarded Dutch left unresolved the
question of the lie of its northern islands, and of Kamchatka’s relation-
ship to Tartary and America. For a knowledge of the interior of Asia,
beyond the ports and markets frequented by merchants, Europe depended
mainly on the missionaries. The scientific training of the Jesuits proved
invaluable in this field. In 1655 Martini produced an atlas of China,
largely from Chinese sources. More information collected by Gruber and
d’Orville on their journey from Peking through the Koko Nor to Lhasa,
and thence by Katmandu to Agra, was published in Athanasius Kircher’s
China lllustrata. In 1688 the French Jesuit Gerbillon travelled to the
Amur, and in 1696 and 1698 he accompanied Chinese officials to ‘jirgas’
of the Mongolian tribes. From these expeditions he brought back a num-
ber of fixes made by astronomical observations, as well as information
about the Lake Baikal region gathered from Russian traders.
A major geographical undertaking was the mapping of China by a team
of Jesuits using scientific methods and acting on the emperor’s orders.
The work was begun in 1707 by taking measurements and bearings along
the fifteen hundred miles of the Great Wall. The work was then pushed to
the borders of Korea, at last identified as an Asian peninsula, thence into
the eastern provinces, and finally into Yunnan. Information about Tibet
was obtained at second hand from specially trained lamas. The work,
which ended in 1717, when combined with earlier information formed the
basis of the maps which were first produced in Peking, and in 1735
published in Paris in the Atlas of d’Anville. In 1688, at Nerchinsk on the
1 Recueil d' observations faites en plusieurs voyages par ordre de sa Majeste pour perfec-
tionner 1 ’ astronomie et la geographie. . .faites par messieurs de 1 ’ Academie Royale des
Sciences (Paris, 1693).
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Amur, Russians, who had been advancing with giant strides across
Siberia, met Jesuits who were in Chinese service. The European penetra-
tion of Asia by sea and by land was thus completed. Though the Russian
material tended to be rough and ready, for much of it was provided by
Cossacks who were trading in furs as far afield as the Pacific coast, it at
last made it possible to complete the map of Asia.
The mapping of Asia was accompanied by an insatiable curiosity in
Europe about the lands thus charted. Merchants were anxious to know
more about markets and trade routes, about the vast miscellany of weights,
measures and coins current in Asia. What Linschoten had been to one
generation, men like Tavernier, whose Voyages provided a wealth of
information about trade goods and trade routes, were to another. The
curiosity of others was that of the armchair traveller. For the new middle-
class reading-public created by cheaper printing there was an endless
supply of Travels and of Voyages round the World (Dampier, Careri,
Anson), in single volumes or in great collections, often lavishly illustrated.
Much of the travel literature gave only the stereotyped and superficial
picture of Asia picked up in port and market-place by men who were
not linguists. But there were also travellers with wider interests and a
more scientific attitude reporting on Asia. Chardin, for many years
jeweller at the court of the Shah, wrote about Persia with understanding
and affection. Bernier made excellent use of his service with a leading
Mughal noble, while Knox used his captivity in Kandy to produce an
Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681). There were also several
semi-official Dutch works of great value, written by men whose long
service in the East enabled them to utilise both company and native
sources. Such were the works of Baldaeus on Malabar and Ceylon, of
Havart on Coromandel, and of the botanist of Amboina, the scholarly
Rumphius, on the history and ethnology of the islands.
The other interpreters of Asia to Europe were the missionaries. In
some ways they were the best qualified for the task. They spent their lives
in Asia; they were often excellent linguists, producing vocabularies and
grammars, translating copiously and collecting widely for their rich
libraries; they met all sorts and conditions of men. While French mis-
sionary scientists were busy at the court of Peking, Portuguese Jesuits
laboured in the heart of the countryside — and yet found time to corre-
spond with the Royal Society, the French Academy, and the Imperial
Academy of Russia. If they had an inborn bias, it was far less marked
than that of Anson, who made cunning and deceit an oriental monopoly.
All the Orders published mission reports to arouse interest in their
work. The Jesuits did so most largely and methodically. Collections of
the Annual Letters from their missions were published in many languages.
There were special reports, such as that on the Mughal Empire produced
by Botelho, Rector of the Agra College, and histories such as de Souza’s
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The Orient Conquered for Jesus Christ, published at Lisbon in 1710. Most
popular and influential of all there were the Lettres edifiantes et curieuses,
an up-to-the-minute encyclopaedia of information about Asia, laced with
improving anecdotes, which appeared from 1702.
Through these Letters, through travel books, through a great web of
learned correspondence between individuals, and after 1665 through the
learned journals, Europe was made aware of the existence of Asiatic
civilisations, with other histories, other social systems, other religions, as
important as her own. Increasingly, as Hazard has put it, the notion of
superiority had to give way to that of difference.
Because of the importance of Arabic for both biblical studies and the
Levant trade — Edward Pococke, the first holder of Laud’s chair of Arabic
at Oxford, had served the Levant Company at Aleppo — this language was
studied first and Islam was the first civilisation to be investigated in the
new light. The Muslim world, revealed from its own sources, was viewed
more sympathetically, so that Simon Ockley at Cambridge could even
stress the debt which the West owed to it. Chardin’s description of the
splendour of Persian civilisation, Hyde’s work on its religious antiquity,
fortified the new impression.
There was less understanding of India, though the Mughal Empire was
tolerably well known, for the key to her greatness was Sanskrit. But in
North India merchant and missionary used Persian, in South India Tamil,
Konkani, or some other vernacular. Not until the 1730’s did the Madura
mission secure Sanskrit manuscripts, and not until the end of the century
were they read. Any understanding of Hindu religion and philosophy had
therefore to be acquired second-hand from vernacular commentaries and
digests. The wonder is how far the Dutch minister Abraham Rogers, or
Bernier, or the missionaries Calmette and Pons, penetrated the confusing
exterior of ceremonies and superstitions to an understanding of the Vedas
and Puranas and of the main schools of Hindu philosophy.
The impact of China, however, was vast and disturbing. Information
about her, learned and popular, poured into Europe. Descriptions such
as those of Semedo (1667) and Avril (1692) (three French editions and
English, Dutch and German versions were published within twelve years),
histories, chronologies, accounts of China’s sciences, and Jesuit transla-
tions of the works of Confucius arrived pell-mell. Travellers recounted the
wealth and swarming population of China’s cities; missionaries stressed
the excellence and antiquity of her morals and administration. But
whereas the civilisation of Persia or Egypt could be linked with the
familiar worlds of the classics and the Bible, China’s was completely dis-
tinct and strange. Remote, self-sufficient, her people and language
affronted those concepts of monogeny to which Europeans were com-
mitted. The study of China made necessary a new attitude to the age of
the earth and the origin of man, invited much questioning of established
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religious doctrine, and provided new models of society for the dissatisfied
in Europe.
In a Europe where accepted history was being shaken by doubt only the
exact chronology of the Vulgate had offered hope of certainty. Egypt and
Assyria had with some difficulty been accommodated to it, but from
China came news of a kingdom whose unbroken sequence of annals
carried its origin far back beyond the Flood. Here was independent
evidence to support the heretical view of Peyrere that Adam was the
ancestor of the Jews only and the Flood a mere local episode. For the
moment the use of the Septuagint might resolve the difficulty; but ideas
of the scale of time and the duration of the earth were being radically
altered.
If the world was older, it was also wider, no longer to be contained
within the narrow confines of Bossuet’s Universal History. 1 Because the
idea of monogeny died hard attempts were still made to find a common
origin for man and his civilisation, if not in the Jewish people, then per-
haps in Egypt. But the spectacle of Asia’s ethnic diversity suggested that
perhaps civilisations were not given things, but the spontaneous products
of local environment. Chardin suggested that the climate of each country
was the principal cause of the inclinations and customs of men. Parrenin
reported the Chinese belief in the influence of ‘water and soil’. Here were
the seeds of the eighteenth-century interest in the influences of geography
and climate upon man. On the other hand, the search for a linguistic unity
— Leibniz considered Chinese the possible mother language of the
world — did produce some positive results. In the first half of the seven-
teenth century Arabic and Persian studies led men like Raphelengius and
Elichmann to note the affinity of Persian to Greek and German. In the
second half of the century Herbert de Jager identified Sanskrit and Tamil
loan-words in Javanese, and Reland, at Utrecht, called attention to the
fact that many of the languages of the islands of the Pacific, the Malay
Archipelago and Madagascar sprang from the same Malay root. The
study of comparative linguistics had thus got under way.
The religious problem posed by China went even deeper. The Jesuits,
with an understandable enthusiasm for their charges, had painted a
glowing picture — more particularly to the public — of the excellent
morality and the virtuous lives of the Chinese. In the teachings of
Confucius, which it would have been unwise to attack, they saw evident
signs that the Chinese had worshipped the true God; ‘who’, asked
d’Orleans in 1688, ‘in reading his excellent morals could fail to believe
that Confucius was a Christian?’ The Chinese, without knowing Christ,
had reached a Christian position. In India Ziegenbalg reached a similar
conclusion with regard to the Hindus. He translated certain Tamil works
especially to show ‘ how far a heathen, even without the Holy Scriptures,
1 See above, ch. v, p. 99.
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could come to the knowledge of the moral law by his natural intelligence’.
The Jesuit Le Comte’s claim, however, that the Chinese had practised the
purest teachings of morality while the rest of the world was still in error
and corruption, was formally condemned in 1700 by the Sorbonne, the
Dominicans demonstrated that Confucian morality was an atheist one,
and the papacy condemned the Chinese rites as idolatrous. The same
conflict, which had ranged the Dominicans and the Jansenists against the
Jesuits in Europe, thus occurred in China, the conflict between Thomism
and Molinism, between belief in predestination and the need for God’s
Grace and the belief that salvation would not be denied to pagans who
strove to live according to the moral law. The old complaint against the
Jesuits’ lax morality had again been pushed home.
The matter did not end there. The conclusion was drawn, as Le Comte
had feared it would be, that a great empire could flourish and a people
live virtuously without the aid of religion. Morals which were a practical
summing-up of human experience and reason produced admirable
political results. In China the Age of Reason had arrived. The philosophes,
seeing how Confucius had ‘put the sceptre in the hands of Philosophy and
made Force quietly obedient to Reason’, 1 rejoiced. Others, too, found
instructive examples in Asia. Pierre Bayle did not fail to contrast the
intolerance of Louis XTV with the tolerance of K’ang-hsi, and Montes-
quieu was to comment on how toleration flourished in the East. Vauban
found in the Chinese national census the instrument for an improved
management of the French economy. Bernier saw in the Morals of
Confucius a text-book for princes, and in the Chinese government a model
for that benevolent despotism which he hoped for in Europe. In India he
noticed the fatal effects of the absence of powerful landowners. Europe,
which was already busy comparing the political and economic institutions
of its own States, thus drew upon the variety and experience of Asia as
well.
The hold exercised over the European mind by China, and to a lesser
extent by other States and civilisations of Asia, lay in this possibility of
comparison. They provided examples to which to point and to appeal,
statements of ideas otherwise not yet safe to express, external authority for
new European beliefs. Their variety and strangeness stimulated inquiry
and question. They provided answers in dangerous abundance. Not for
nothing did satire choose the imaginary voyage as its favourite vehicle
and put its most destructive criticism in the mouth of Turk, Persian or
Chinese. Asia gave European man new clothes, new styles, new plants;
she also gave him a new antiquity, a new perspective.
1 F. de La Mothe le Vayer, De la Vertu des Payens (Paris, 1642), p. 283.
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2. THE ENGLISH AND DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANIES
By the middle of the seventeenth century the United Dutch East India
Company ( Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) was the most powerful
European institution in Asia. The strength of the company was based on
its seapower, but in the territorial sense its activities in Asia had their
centre at Batavia, in West Java. From Batavia and the fortress of Malacca
(captured from the Portuguese in 1641) the Dutch were able to dominate
the Straits of Sunda and Malacca and the seas between Borneo and
Sumatra, through which shipping moving from the Indian Ocean into the
Eastern Seas, or coming from the Moluccas or the China Sea to the west,
had to pass. From this centre they were able to prevent their Portuguese
and English rivals from maintaining any significant trading connections
with the Indonesian Archipelago, and were themselves well placed to
develop a commercial system with factories stretching from Japan to
Persia. In the eyes of the company’s servants the most important part of
this commercial system was the Moluccas, the fabulous ‘spice islands’.
The company’s hold on the Banda Islands gave it a monopoly of the
supply of nutmeg and its by-product mace, whilst Amboina, Ceram and
its smaller neighbours in the southern Moluccas provided it with an ample
supply of cloves. In the northern Moluccas the Dutch sought by agree-
ments with the Sultan of Ternate, and by punitive military expeditions, to
extirpate the cultivation of cloves on islands which they were not them-
selves exploiting, so as to obtain an effective monopoly of the product.
By 1656, when the most ambitious of these expeditions had been con-
cluded, and the Sultan of Ternate reduced to the company’s vassal, its
grip on the production of cloves may be regarded as effective; but its
control over the northern Moluccas was not complete until 1663, when
the Spanish outpost on the island of Tidore was withdrawn and its Sultan
left without a protector. Another ‘ spice island ’ on which the Dutch were
firmly established was Ceylon. Here, acting in name as the ally of Raja
Sinha of Kandy, they had expelled the Portuguese from all their coastal
fortresses by 1658, and in defiance of their agreement with the Kandyan
ruler had occupied the most important themselves. Possession of Galle,
Colombo and Negombo gave them de facto control over a large part of
the rich cinnamon-producing areas of south-west Ceylon, and their agree-
ment with Raja Sinha granted them a monopoly of the island’s external
trade.
There were a few other places where the Dutch company exercised in
the middle of the seventeenth century a form of political control, based
either on annexation or occupation by force or arms. The most important
of these were the Cape of Good Hope (colonised after 1652 as a port of
call on the route to Europe), a fortified factory on the north coast of
Formosa (established in 1 624) from which it was able to tap the China trade,
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and the previously Portuguese-held ports of Tuticorin and Negapatam, in
South India, which the Dutch occupied in 1657 and 1658 to prevent the
Portuguese from mounting a counter-attack against Ceylon. In the main,
however, the Dutch establishments outside the areas of the spice monopoly
were not of this kind, but were trading factories planted within the juris-
diction of independent Asian States. Such were the ten factories on the
Coromandel coast of India, the so-called ‘left arm of the Moluccas’,
which supplied cotton piece-goods to be used in place of bullion as a
medium of exchange in the purchase of pepper from Sumatra and west
Java. At Pulicat, their headquarters on this coast until the capture of
Negapatam, the Dutch had built a fortress to shelter them from Portuguese
attacks, and all the factories were to some extent fortified for defence.
Yet, though in some places the Dutch factors administered the towns in
which they lived in exchange for an annual rent, Dutch jurisdiction never
extended inland. They did not control the areas of textile production, and
in the last resort their position was dependent on the goodwill of the local
rulers. This was even more the case with the factories up the Hugli river in
Bengal, and in Gujarat in western India. Both these areas were within
the boundaries of the Mughal Empire so that political independence from
it was out of the question, and the trade though prosperous could be
halted at any time if the financial demands of local governors were not
met. In the same way the Arabian coffee factory at Mocha and the silk
factories in Persia were purely trading settlements; so were the minor
establishments in the countries of the mainland of south-east Asia. But
the extreme case of a factory maintained at a political disadvantage for its
commercial benefits was that in Japan, where the Dutch were the only
foreigners allowed entry after Portuguese and Spanish missionary activities
had frightened the Japanese government into forbidding all intercourse
with the outside world. After 1639 the Dutch factors were confined to the
small island of Deshima, off Nagasaki, and the number of ships allowed
to call was severely restricted.
The position of the English East India Company in Asia at this time
was far more modest than that of the Dutch. Without the resources or the
inclination to pursue a policy of commercial monopoly based on naval
and military power, it failed to make any headway within the Indonesian
Archipelago against Dutch hostility, and after 1 628 its only footing there
was one factory at Bantam, in West Java, whose ruler was opposed to the
Dutch. The company’s factories on the east coast of India and in Bengal,
though commercially important, were far fewer than those of their Dutch
rivals. Like the Dutch factories in this area they had originally been
established to provide piece-goods for the markets of the archipelago, and
until 1652 they were administered from Bantam. From then onwards the
seat of the Eastern Presidency was at Madras, where the company was
allowed to build a fortress, Fort St George, and to exercise administrative
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control over the town in return for the payment of half the customs dues
to the kingdom of Golconda. The company’s main efforts in this period,
however, were concentrated on the west coast of India, where it had been
able to establish a position of relative commercial advantage in the earlier
years of the seventeenth century while Dutch efforts were concentrated on
the Indonesian Archipelago. The main English factory was at Surat, in
Gujarat, but the English had also established trading centres inland at
Ahmadabad, Broach and Agra. In return for co-operating with the Shah
of Persia in the expulsion of the Portuguese from the island of Ormuz in
1622 they were able to obtain a privileged footing in the Persian port of
Gombroon, free of tolls and with a share in the customs levied on others.
This enabled them to develop a profitable exchange trade between Persia
and western India. Their trade in this quarter was further stimulated by
the political initiative of the president of the Surat factory, who in 1635
came to a local understanding with the Portuguese viceroy at Goa. The
East Indies had not been covered by the English peace treaty with Philip IV
of Spain in 1630; but the Accord of 1635 (extended by the Anglo-
Portuguese Treaty of 1642 and confirmed by Cromwell’s Treaty of 1654)
not only brought peace between the English and Portuguese in the East,
but opened all the Portuguese settlements, except Macao, to the trade of
the East India Company. Relieved from the necessity of convoy, except in
times of war with the United Provinces, the company could thus use small
local vessels to develop the port-to-port trade of the ‘western quarter’ (as
the Dutch called Indian and Persian waters); unlike the Dutch, who had
their own supplies in the archipelago, it was able to tap the trade in pepper
and other products of the Malabar coast.
The contrast between the achievements of the Dutch and English
companies in Asia by the middle of the seventeenth century may be
largely ascribed to the differences in their metropolitan organisation and
the position which they held in Dutch and English society. The United
Dutch East India Company was an amalgamation of the six previously
existing companies of Amsterdam, Hoorn, Enkhuizen, Rotterdam, Delft
and Middelburg. These remained in existence as separate chambers and
sent delegates to the Court of Directors — the Heeren Zeventien — which
provided the company with a permanent central administration. The
company’s resources were drawn from all the mercantile centres of the
Netherlands. Its initial capital was about 6-5 million guilders, almost ten
times as much as that with which the English East India Company com-
menced operations. The directors of the provincial chambers and the
Heeren Zeventien were members of the ruling families of the towns. The
central direction of the company was thus strong and able to exercise a
preponderant influence over the individual shareholders ; at the same time
the company was intimately connected through these personal links with
government circles and was in a very real sense the representative of the
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State in Asia. Its charters, in addition to giving it a national monopoly of
trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, empowered it to make treaties with
Asian States, to take possession of territory in full sovereignty, to build
fortresses, to raise military forces, and to wage war. So strong was the
position of the directors that they were able to appropriate a large propor-
tion of the capital and profits of the company to fixed investments of a
political kind in Asia, without challenge from individual stockholders, who
were denied access to the company’s accounts.
The English East India Company was established at the beginning of the
seventeenth century by royal charters which granted to ‘ the Governor and
Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies ’ a national
monopoly of trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and the power to
purchase land, to sue and be sued, and to use a common seal. The
company, however, did not have the wide military and diplomatic powers
of its Dutch rival, and its charter did not extend to places in the possession
of other Christian princes at peace with the English Crown, unless it was
specifically invited to trade there; nor was it closely linked to the State.
Stuart foreign policy often ran counter to the company’s interests, and
Charles I in 1635, when in need of money, granted a licence to trade
within the area of the company’s monopoly to a rival mercantile syndicate.
The company’s affairs were directed by a governor, a deputy governor and
a treasurer, as well as by a court of twenty-four ‘committees’ or directors
who were elected annually at the general court of all the stockholders;
but for the first half-century of its existence the company had no perma-
nent capital. Its members invested in a series of voyages and joint stocks ;
each of them was successively wound up, and the capital and profits were
distributed. Continuity was provided by the fact that governors and
‘committees’ tended to be large stockholders, whose fortunes depended
on the sale and re-export of eastern goods, and who were re-elected from
year to year. In 1635 they held more stock than the four hundred small
investors put together. Their authority was, however, restricted by the
fact that all the stockholders, however small their investment, voted on an
equal footing in the general court. The majority of the small stockholders,
who were not directly interested in the company’s activities except as an
opportunity for profitable investment, viewed the governors and ‘com-
mittees’ as delegates rather than as managers. These had therefore
continually to resist pressure for a distribution of profits, so that they
would be able to finance fixed investment in the company’s Asian factories
and to keep trade going in bad years. Their difficulties were further
increased by the disturbances and the uncertainty of the Civil War. The
charter granted to the company by Oliver Cromwell in October 1657,
however, marked a turning-point in its fortunes. It established for the
first time a permanent joint stock and, by making votes in the general
court proportionate to each member’s stock-holding, secured the pre-
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dominance of the company’s officers and the large stockholders over the
smaller ones. These elements of increased strength and stability were
perpetuated by the charters of Charles II and James II, and the company’s
position was further reinforced by close personal links with the court and
by the anti-Dutch foreign policy of the later Stuarts. After 1660 the
English company was much more akin to the Dutch company in its
ability to conduct a coherent trading policy.
So far as the Dutch East India Company was concerned the years
between 1660 and 1684 were a time of vigorous consolidation, largely by
the use of war as an instrument of policy. The company’s directors were
concerned with profits rather than with the acquisition of territory. They
sought where possible to confine their authority to a minimum of impor-
tant trading ports and to avoid involvement in the internal conflicts of
Asian States. Yet, partly because of the unstable nature of local politics,
especially in the Indonesian Archipelago, and partly because of then-
insistence on monopoly and the elimination of local rivals, the Dutch for
most of this period had to extend their authority by arms. First, from
their newly acquired bases in Ceylon, they reduced their Portuguese
opponents in the Indian Ocean to a position of complete impotence. They
had since 1636 conducted an intermittent blockade of the Portuguese
headquarters at Goa. In 1661 they sent a fleet under Rijkloff van Goens
against the Portuguese ports on the Malabar coast and captured the towns
of Quilon and Kranganur, though they failed to take the main Portuguese
position at Cochin. In the same year a peace treaty between Portugal and
Holland was signed in Europe, 1 and had it been ratified promptly Cochin
would have been saved. The negotiations were, however, prolonged by
the intervention of Portugal’s English ally, Charles H, who was unwilling
to see the Dutch admitted to the trading privileges which the English
enjoyed in the Portuguese settlements under the Accord of 1635. The
treaty was not finally ratified until December 1662, and official news of this
was not received in the east until several months later. This delay sealed
the fate of Cochin. In September 1662 a large Dutch fleet sailed from
Batavia for the Malabar coast, and after resisting several assaults the town
fell in January 1663. The subsequent capture of Cannanore completed the
conquest of the Portuguese ports, which were placed under the authority
of the governor of Ceylon, thus giving the Dutch East India Company a
virtual monopoly of the pepper production of the area.
In the Indonesian Archipelago the Dutch position outside the Moluccas
rested on commercial treaties with local rulers which granted to the
company complete or partial monopolies of various imports and exports.
There were, however, a number of powerful Indonesian trading centres
which refused to acquiesce in this state of affairs, and their influence the
Dutch set out to reduce. One of these was the sultanate of Atjeh, at the
1 See above, ch. xvi, p. 394.
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northern tip of Sumatra. This State was the main centre of Islamic
influence and trade in the area and exercised the overlordship of the tin-
producing State of Perak, on the western side of the Malayan Peninsula,
and of the pepper-producing areas of the west coast of Sumatra. A series
of commercial treaties with Atjeh had been concluded between 1637 and
1659 granting the company a monopoly of the pepper exports and a share
in the tin exports of Perak; but these were not kept, despite periodic
Dutch blockades to prevent the sale of the commodities to other customers.
In 1660 the Dutch therefore embarked on more direct action, establishing
residents at several ports on the west coast of Sumatra and encouraging
the Malay inhabitants to throw off Atjehnese control. In 1663 the Treaty
of Painan brought the districts of Padang, Tiku and Indrapura under the
company’s protection in exchange for a monopoly of trade, and by 1670
the Atjehnese had been driven up the coast from Indrapura to the
boundaries of the Atjehnese homeland. At the same time Dutch naval
patrols and a Dutch fort on the island of Dindings, off the mouth of the
Perak river, effectively shut them out of the tin trade. Meanwhile the
Dutch company consolidated its position on the west coast of Sumatra.
Opposition within the ‘ protected ’ districts around Padang was suppressed
by the use of Ambonese and Bugis mercenaries. At the instigation of its
agent on the spot, Jacob Pits, the company installed a chief of the
Menangkabau people of the Padang Highlands as ruler of a Menangkabau
State. They then acknowledged him as overlord of all the other petty
States on the west coast, and received in return confirmation of their
trading rights there and the grant of an area around Padang, which
became the company’s headquarters in west Sumatra.
A more dangerous threat to Dutch commercial supremacy than that of
Atjeh arose from the Sultanate of Macassar, in south-west Celebes. The
suppression of the independence of the Moluccan rulers had made it the
most important Muslim centre in these seas, and it served as a base for
Indonesian smugglers of cloves from the neighbouring spice islands. It
was also a centre for other Europeans, English, Danes and Portuguese,
whom the Dutch regarded as interlopers. There were clashes between
Macassar and the Dutch in 1653 and 1660; but it was the attempt of its
ruler to form an anti-Dutch coalition with other Muslim States and to
conclude an alliance with the English company during the second Anglo-
Dutch War that finally decided Johan Maetsuycker (governor-general,
1653-78) to embark on its conquest. This was undertaken by the young
Cornelis Speelman between 1666 and 1668. The Treaty of Bongaya
(November 1 668) reduced the Sultan’s jurisdiction to the town of Macassar
and its environs. His former territories outside these limits and the
dependent States of Boni, Buton and Sumbawa were brought under
Dutch suzerainty. In Macassar itself the company imposed its monopoly
over trade, expelled all non-Dutch Europeans, declared its own coins legal
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tender, and built in the centre of the town the fortress ‘Rotterdam’. In
view of the severity of these terms it is not surprising that a further cam-
paign was necessary before the treaty could be executed.
The reduction of Atjeh and Macassar was followed by an extension of
the company’s authority in Java, largely caused by political instability
in the States of Mataram and Bantam. Mataram had been founded at the
end of the sixteenth century by a prince who brought under his suzerainty
the highlands and rice plains of most of central and east Java, together
with the formerly independent seaports of the north coast. The young
Susuhunan (emperor) Amangkurat I (asc. 1645) continued the efforts of
his predecessors to bring this large area under effective control and to
reduce the power of the territorial chiefs and the influence of the Muslim
teachers. His precipitate measures incurred the hostility especially of the
semi-independent princes of the north coast, who rose in revolt in 1674
under the leadership of Trunajoyo, ruler of Madura. They were joined by
elements driven out of Macassar by Speelman in 1669; emboldened by the
difficulties of the Dutch during the third Anglo-Dutch War, they hoped to
use this movement to strike at Dutch power in the archipelago. At the
same time Sultan Abdulfatah Agung of Bantam, in west Java, sought to
take advantage of his neighbours’ troubles by occupying the western
provinces of Mataram, to the south and east of Batavia. Abdulfatah
(reigned 1651-83) was a formidable political and commercial rival of the
company. His capital was a centre for European and Muslim traders, and
his links with Mecca and Turkey made him a natural leader of Muslim
opinion against the Dutch. The latter therefore felt themselves directly
threatened by the prospect of their headquarters being surrounded by
Bantamese territory. The final overthrow of Amangkurat I in 1677,
despite the Dutch occupation of Surabaya and naval action, both
designed to prevent supplies and reinforcements from reaching the rebels,
precipitated a division of opinion amongst the company’s officials.
Rijkloff van Goens and Speelman both advocated intervention and the
assertion of the company’s supremacy in Java. Maetsuycker, older, and
concerned to retain a reputation with the directors in Holland for caution
and economic administration, disagreed. The debate was sharpened by
the arrival as a refugee of Amangkurat’s son, promising commercial and
territorial concessions in return for Dutch support. It was settled decisively
in January 1678 by the death of Maetsuycker. He was succeeded as
governor-general by van Goens (1678-81) and Speelman (1681-4), who
presided in turn over the implementation of the policy which they had
advocated. Under van Goens, Trunajoyo’s rebellion was subdued and
Amangkurat II restored to his father’s throne. In 1682 Speelman took
advantage of a dynastic conflict in Bantam to depose Sultan Abdulfatah
and replace him on the throne by his son Abdulkahar, known as Sultan
Haji. Both of these new rulers were dependent upon Dutch support and
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heavily indebted to the company for the expenses of the campaigns which
had placed them on their thrones. On its side the company secured a
virtual monopoly of the external trade of Java, and the expulsion of all
other Europeans, including the closing of the English East India Com-
pany’s factory at Bantam. At the same time the Dutch company annexed
the Preanger region, stretching southwards across Java from Batavia to
the sea and separating Mataram and Bantam, and brought under its
control the ports of Semarang and Cheribon. From 1684 therefore the
Dutch were without any serious rivals in the archipelago. They had
eliminated all the important centres of independent trade and were in a
position to assert their control over the Javanese States. Although they
had not yet become the direct rulers of any large stretches of territory, we
may from this date speak justly of the area as ‘Netherlands India’.
The year which saw the Dutch East India Company established in a
position of absolute supremacy in the archipelago witnessed the beginning
of a crisis in the affairs of the English company in India. There was for
some years after 1660 a steady growth in the numbers and prosperity of
the English factories and settlements in India. T his prosperity was seen
not only in the well-established centres at Surat and Madras, but also in
the growth of the trade of the Bengal factories, and in the planting of
several settlements on the Malabar coast to reopen the pepper trade which
the fall of the Portuguese ports to the Dutch had cut off. The company’s
most important acquisition, however, was the island of Bombay. This had
originally passed to Charles II as part of the Portuguese marriage settle-
ment in 1661, but the king found it an unprofitable possession. The royal
garrison sent out in 1662 did not actually obtain possession of the island
until 1665, by which time its numbers had been reduced by disease from
500 to 102, and Charles was glad to make the place over to the East India
Company in 1 668 in exchange for an annual quit-rent of £10. The potential
importance of Bombay lay not only in the fact that it had an excellent
position as a trading and shipping centre on the west coast of India, but that
it was not subject to the control of any Indian State or the whims of a local
governor and was easily defensible against a land power. It was placed
under the control of Surat, and chiefly owing to the exertions of Gerald
Aungier (president at Surat, 1669-77) soon became a thriving settlement.
The coins of the mint established there soon won general acceptance
throughout western India; despite the prevalence of disease its population
by 1671 had risen to 60,000, and the company’s officials had developed the
habit of speaking of it as a ‘ colony ’. The royal connection which had given
thecompany Bombay was not, however, without its embarrassments. There
were divisions within the factories between the older Puritan elements and
the Royalist officials sent out after 1660, and the latter were usually sup-
ported by the many king’s officers in the settlements during these years.
Conflicts developed between the two factions and between military and
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civil powers, resulting in a number of rebellions in India and at St Helena
(permanently secured in 1673 as a port of call), in which the dissident
parties endeavoured to take over the government in the name of the king.
The last, and the most serious, was that led by Richard Keigwin, military
commander at Bombay, in 1683 and 1684. In all these affairs Charles II
loyally supported the authority of the company, and his influence was
exerted to secure the submission of the malcontents.
The attempts of soldiers to claim a voice in the direction of affairs
within the Indian factories were indicative of the increasing importance of
the military element in the company’s position there. Aungier, for instance,
had to maintain the security of the west coast settlements against the
formidable Malabar pirates, against the Marathas (who sacked Surat in
1664 and 1670), and against a Dutch attempt on Bombay in 1673. In the
Madras area and in Bengal too, English interests were more and more
placed in jeopardy by a decline in the authority of the Mughal central
government during the reign of the Emperor Aurangzib (1658-1707). The
war between Sivaji, the Maratha leader, and the Mughal armies kept the
west coast in a state of upheaval. Sivaji was able at will to cut off the
landward trade of Bombay and to plunder the English factories farther
south, so that in 1674 the company’s officials were compelled to come to
terms with him. The Mughals, however, demanded the use of Bombay
and its harbour for their mercenary naval auxiliaries, the Sidis of Janjira,
and were capable of revenging themselves on the factory at Surat if
refused. Bombay was thus caught between two fires. When the Mughal
fleet sheltered in Bombay harbour and landed a force there the Marathas
responded by taking reprisals against other English settlements. In 1679
both sides occupied different islands in Bombay harbour, and the neigh-
bouring waters became the scene of fighting. On the Coromandel coast
the Anglo-Dutch War of 1672-4 brought fighting between French and
Dutch for the town of St Thome, on the southern outskirts of Madras, and
a Dutch naval squadron dislocated shipping. In 1677 Sivaji, with an army
of 60,000 men, extended his activities into south-east India. The hinterland
of Madras was kept in disorder by Maratha raids, and the town itself was
threatened. So complete was the turmoil that in 1681 a local chief was
able to blockade Madras and to bring it to the verge of starvation. It was
only with the appearance of Aurangzib himself in southern India in 1683
and his conquest of Golconda that some semblance of order was restored,
and the English factories on the Coromandel coast passed under the over-
lordship of the Mughal Empire (1687). In Bengal the weakness of the
Imperial government expressed itself not in disorder, but in the freedom
of the nawab or viceroy and his officials to levy their own dues on trade
unchecked by higher authority. From 1656 onwards the East India
Company had enjoyed freedom from all duties there in return for an
annual payment of 3000 rupees. By 1672, however, the then nawab,
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Shaista Khan, felt himself strong enough to disregard this compact and
stopped the trade until his additional demands were met. The Bengal trade
was particularly vulnerable to this kind of treatment, since it had to pass
by boat from the inland factories down the river to the main factory at
Hugh, some twenty miles above the highest point which the company’s
ships could reach. In 1677, when Shaista Khan temporarily resigned his
office, the company repurchased exemption from dues for a payment of
21,000 rupees, and when he returned in 1679 it obtained from the emperor
himself in the following year a farman confirming this arrangement. Shaista
Khan, however, ignored this and again imposed his own duties, allowing
his local officials to extort what additional sums they could for their own
pockets. When in 1685 the company’s officials at Hugli asked leave to
move to a place lower down the river he refused and surrounded several
of the factories with troops.
These developments in India, and the expulsion of the English from
Bantam by the Dutch in 1682, led the company’s governing committee
to abandon the policy which they had followed faithfully for eighty years,
of confining their activities to peaceful trade and relying upon local powers
for the security of their goods and settlements. They resolved instead to
fortify their settlements and to enforce the safety of their trade by arms.
This change of policy is usually associated with the names of Sir Josiah
Child, governor of the company five times between 1681 and 1687 and a
preponderant influence in its committee, and his namesake Sir John
Child, president of Surat and governor of Bombay from 1682 to 1690.
In 1684 they replaced Bantam by the fortified factory of Benkulen, in
south-west Sumatra. To implement their policy in India they dispatched
an expedition of ten ships and some 700 troops. This force was instructed
to withdraw the company’s servants from Bengal, to capture and fortify
Chittagong on the north-eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal, and to
establish there a second Bombay, with its own mint, a secure centre for
the trade of north-eastern India. This, and the cutting off of all local
shipping on the west coast as well as in the bay, was expected to bring
both the emperor and the nawab to such a state of mind that they would
grant favourable terms for trade and henceforth show respect for English
interests. Conceived in London, it was a plan which completely under-
estimated both the still formidable power of the Mughal Empire and the
geographical distances and difficulties involved. The expedition became
separated on the voyage out, but in the autumn of 1686 part of it reached
the Ganges delta, and 300 men were sent up to Hugli in boats. Their
arrival provoked an attack by the local military commander, which they
were able to beat off, but Job Chamock, the head of the factory, felt his
position so insecure that he seized the opportunity to retreat down the
river. There he maintained himself against attack and disease among the
swampy islands of the delta, until he was taken off in September 1 688 by a
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force designed for the capture of Chittagong. That place, however, was
far too strongly defended to be taken by fifteen small ships and 300 men,
and the English were left with no alternative but to retire to Madras,
where they arrived in March 1689. Events elsewhere in India had been
equally disastrous. Sir John Child’s attempts to cut off Mughal shipping
and to withdraw the establishment at Surat to Bombay, which had become
the administrative centre for all the west coast settlements in 1687, pro-
voked the seizure alike of the Surat factory and of those at Masulipatam
and Vizagapatam, on the Coromandel coast. At the same time the Siddi
fleet attacked Bombay, and when repulsed instituted a close siege. Child
therefore sued for peace on behalf of the company, and Aurangzib —
aware that, though he had the English factories within his grip, their ships
were still capable of stopping the trade and pilgrim traffic between India
and western Asia — granted it. His farman of 27 February 1690 readmitted
the English to the trade of the Mughal Empire, provided that they paid a
fine of 150,000 rupees (about £17,000) and that Child was dismissed from
his post. The latter demand created no difficulty, because Child had
already died at Bombay early in February. Chamock, however, refused
to return to Bengal from Madras until in addition to the emperor’s farman
he had also secured from the nawab Ibrahim Khan (who had replaced
Shaista Khan) a specific promise that the company would be allowed to
trade free of duties and unhampered by local exactions in return for the
old payment of 3000 rupees per annum. When he did return in August
1690 he established his headquarters not at Hugli, but farther down the
river on the site which he had occupied between 1686 and 1688, within
reach of the company’s ships. This was fortified in 1696 under the name
of Fort William, and eventually became the city of Calcutta.
The political and military activities of the English East India Company
in these years were on a smaller scale, and less successful, than those of the
Dutch company. It did, however, develop under the later Stuarts from a
purely trading body into a nascent territorial power, with fortified settle-
ments containing large local populations, with the right of coinage, the
command of English and Indian troops, the authority to conclude treaties
and to make war, and other attributes of delegated sovereignty. More-
over, its commercial activities between 1660 and 1688, in terms of its trade
between England and Asia, the numbers of its ships sent out, and the size
of its dividends at home, came to compare very favourably with those of
the Dutch company. The Dutch in this period diverted a far larger pro-
portion of their profits into political and military expenses and fixed
investments as the price of their success in the archipelago. But even
allowing for this, a comparison, until about 1688, with the accounts of
the English company shows an increasing measure of commercial success
on the part of the latter. After this date, however, the English trading and
shipping figures fell, and between 1692 and 1700 the company paid no
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dividends whatsoever. In part this decline may be ascribed to the expenses
of the unsuccessful Mughal war and to shipping losses during the French
war of 1689-97. Mainly, however, it reflects changes in the political position
of the East India Company at home as a result of the Revolution of 1688.
Its close association with the Stuart court and the anti-Dutch and pro-
French policies of Charles II and James II meant that it was increasingly
alienated from the main body of English political opinion. After the
Revolution it was faced with a hostile parliament which condoned the
activities of interlopers, supported a bitter pamphlet war against the
company’s trading monopoly, and itself challenged that monopoly in
1694. The Scots Company (founded in 1695), which expended its resources
in an attempt to establish a colony in the Isthmus of Darien, was no real
threat to the English East India Company’s position. In 1698, however, a
rival ‘New’ East India Company was set up in London by Act of Parlia-
ment, and subsequently received a charter from William III. There
followed a period of competition between the Old and New Companies in
London and between their servants in India, where the New Company
established factories alongside those of their rivals, which brought profit
to neither. It was eventually ended in 1709 by their amalgamation into
one ‘United Company of Merchants of England trading to the East
Indies’. This provided once more the element of strength in the conduct
of English commercial affairs in Asia which had been lacking since the
beginning of the 1690’s.
By 1709 the main lines on which the activities and interests of the
English and Dutch East India Companies were to develop in the
eighteenth century may already be distinguished. The Dutch reinforced
their political supremacy in Java by a further intervention in the internal
affairs of Mataram between 1703 and 1705. They were able to use this
supremacy to secure the delivery of large quantities of saleable products,
such as pepper and rice. From the beginning of the eighteenth century
they introduced new crops, most important among them coffee and sugar,
which became the basis of a thriving export trade to Europe. Their
establishment on Formosa had been lost as early as 1662, and the China
trade had become of minor value to the company, although its officials
in Batavia made handsome private profits from the trade by junk with
Canton. The Dutch factories in India and the Japan factory were retained,
but their trade became proportionately less important, and Dutch interests
became more and more centred on the Indonesian Archipelago, and
within the archipelago, on Java. The English East India Company con-
tinued to maintain factories on the west coast of Sumatra, but their
establishment at Benkulen did not produce the large quantities of spices
expected from it, and the trade became of minor importance. More signi-
ficant was the development of the China trade; in the hope of profiting
from it the company maintained struggling and unprofitable factories at
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Tonkin, Amoy and on Formosa at various times between 1672 and 1697.
The ship Macclesfield, sent out to Canton by the New Company in 1699,
successfully established a trading-connection there, and from 1705 on-
wards this trade became increasingly important. It was in India, however,
that the United Company’s main effort was applied. Grants obtained
from the Emperor Farrukhsiyar by the embassy sent to the Mughal court
in 1714 won for the company a privileged position in trade, which it was
able to extend to the administration of the areas around many of its
factories. Thus the English East India Company was able to build up that
position of strength which, when Mughal authority disintegrated, enabled
it to contend with the French for supremacy in India.
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CHAPTER XVIII
THE EMPIRE AFTER
THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
W hen the Peace of Westphalia was signed on 24 October 1648
and the warring parties finally laid down their arms, a settlement
was reached which, in its essential features, was to last until the
dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. For a century and longer
civil war had been endemic in Germany, and there were to be many minor
upheavals in the future; but until 1740, when Frederick II of Prussia chose
to invade Silesia and to break the peace of the Empire, that peace was not
disturbed by any major internal war. Yet, while the conditions of the
Empire were settled by the peace of 1648, the same did not apply to the
conditions of Europe. Wars continued in the west and in the east, against
France and against the Turks; and Louis XIV found it easy to find allies
among the German princes and to use them against the Empire which he
was fighting. Internally, however, an equilibrium was reached between
the Emperor and the princes, between Protestants and Catholics, between
the centrifugal forces and those aiming at more centralisation. A com-
promise solution was found which, by its very durability, proved that it
was not unsatisfactory.
In practice the Empire now consisted of Germany and the Habsburg
hereditary lands: its frontiers had contracted; but Switzerland and the
Netherlands had long ceased to be parts of the Empire, and the official
recognition of this fact was an advantage, and not a loss. It was much
more important that parts of Alsace were ceded to France, and western
Pomerania with Stettin, Wismar and the duchies of Bremen and Verden
to Sweden. This meant not only a loss of territory, but provided both
powers with endless opportunities of making further claims and of fishing
in troubled waters, of which France in particular was not slow to avail
herself. Sweden not only gained those scattered territories and thus con-
trolled the mouths of the Oder, Elbe and Weser, but she also received a
war indemnity of 5,000,000 guilders which had to be raised by the
impoverished principalities of the Empire. It was not until June 1650 that
the Swedish army was disbanded and left the non-Swedish territories; it
took another three years before it evacuated eastern Pomerania (which had
fallen to Brandenburg), and only on condition that Sweden would receive
half the revenue from the harbour tolls and customs. In 1652 the Swedish
army opened hostilities against the Free City of Bremen which had not
been ceded to Sweden — in contrast with the duchy of Bremen — and there-
fore declined to render homage to her. The burghers resisted with
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determination, and the Emperor as well as neighbouring princes tried to
mediate. In 1654 a compromise was reached which left it open whether
Bremen was a Free Imperial City, but obliged the burghers to render a
conditional oath of allegiance to Sweden. After the death of King
Charles X, however, they again refused to render homage to Charles XI
as his subjects and instead sent deputies to attend the Imperial Diet.
Thereupon the Swedish army in 1666 laid siege to Bremen; but the
burghers’ resistance and the intervention of Denmark, the United
Provinces and several German princes forced the Swedish government to
make peace and to recognise Bremen as a Free City. Until 1700, however,
it was not permitted to send deputies to the Imperial Diet.
That the stipulations of the peace treaty facilitated the interference of
foreign powers was shown even more clearly in the Rhineland. At the end
of 1654 the archbishops of Cologne, Trier and Mainz, the bishop of
Munster and the count palatine of Neuburg, who was also the duke of
Julich and Berg, concluded a Rhenish Alliance which was to protect its
members against attacks and to become a mediating factor in European
politics. Its importance was increased by the fact that the elder son and
elected successor of the Emperor Ferdinand III had died in the same year,
while his younger son, Leopold, was but fourteen years old. His youth
provided Cardinal Mazarin with an argument for supporting the candida-
ture of a non-Habsburg prince, either the Elector of Bavaria or the Count
Palatine of Neuburg. When Ferdinand III died in April 1657 no successor
had been elected, and the interregnum, which lasted for fifteen months, was
filled with intrigues, threats and promises on the side of France. In July
1658, however, the young Leopold was unanimously elected Emperor by
the Electors, having promised that he would render no support whatever
to Spain in the war with France which was still continuing. Four weeks
later many German princes — the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and
Trier, the bishop of Munster, the count palatine of Neuburg, the land-
grave of Hesse-Cassel, the dukes of Brunswick and Liineburg, and the
king of Sweden as duke of Bremen and Verden — signed the Rhenish
Alliance, which was joined on the following day by France. The army of
the league was to number 10,000 men, 2400 of whom were to be French.
The aims of the league were the maintenance of the peace treaty, of the
liberties of the Estates of the Empire, and of a balance between France
and the Habsburgs. But the German members were much too weak to
pursue an independent policy or to form a third force, and in reality the
league became an instrument of French foreign policy. It was renewed
several times and joined by other German princes, among them the
Elector of Brandenburg; but it was dissolved in 1668. By that time it had
become clear that the German liberties were not threatened by the
Emperor Leopold, but by Louis XIV. As the Crowns of France and
Sweden were recognised as guarantors of the peace, and as Sweden
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acquired two seats in the Imperial Diet, both powers continued to play a
very important part in the internal affairs of the Empire: until the reign
of Louis XIV reached its end and the Swedish Empire collapsed in the
Great War of the North.
During the Thirty Years War the Habsburgs had made strenuous
efforts to increase the powers of the Emperor, to create a centralised
monarchy, to subdue the Protestant princes, and to advance the cause of
the Counter-Reformation — and they had come very close to success. The
Peace of Westphalia buried these endeavours, but it also buried the
opposite tendency : the attempts of the Calvinist princes to transform the
Empire into an aristocratic republic, to carry the banner of Protestantism
into the very heart of the Habsburg lands and to lay low the power of the
Habsburgs. The Peace of Westphalia was a compromise. The unity of the
Empire was preserved; the Imperial Crown remained in the Habsburg
family as long as the House of Austria continued in the male line; its
power was strengthened through the defeat of the Bohemians and the
introduction of the Counter-Reformation in its hereditary lands; even in
the Empire the power of the Emperor was by no means negligible. He
continued to influence the decisions of the Imperial Diet, to defend the
frontiers of the Empire against foreign attack, to act as arbiter in cases of
internal conflict between the princes and within the principalities. His
hereditary lands — soon to be expanded towards the south-east — made
him a prince much more powerful than any of the Electors. Ferdinand m
and Leopold I were far from showing political resignation and continued
to focus their attention upon the Empire. The siege of Vienna by the
Turks 1 led to a revival of Christian and Imperial solidarity, transcending
the frontiers of the Empire. This feeling remained alive during the suc-
cessful campaigns against the Turks, and the Emperor remained its living
symbol. The people hoped that, after the end of the wars, he would restore
the good old laws of the Empire and revive the authority of the Emperor.
Nor was this entirely a pious hope: the century after 1648 saw a distinct
revival of his authority, especially so under Leopold’s successors, Joseph I
and Charles VI. The rise of the Habsburgs in the power politics of
Europe had clear repercussions within the Empire.
Yet the Empire after 1648 was incapable of acting as a unit and had no
will of its own. The Estates of the Empire followed their own particular
interests; they watched each other with jealous eyes and attempted to
strengthen their own power, internally as well as externally, and to
decrease that of the Emperor. It is true that the French policy of granting
full sovereignty to the German princes had not prevailed at Westphalia:
they had been accorded only a jus territorii et superioritatis by the terms
of the peace. It seems doubtful, however, whether this made a great
difference in practice. If the princes were granted the right of concluding
1 See below, ch. xxi, pp. 5x5-17.
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alliances amongst themselves and with foreign powers, this was a right
which they had long exercised. If they were forbidden to conclude such
alliances against the Emperor and the Empire, this prohibition could be
interpreted in different ways. It is not surprising that the political writers
of the time found it difficult to define what the Empire really was.
Hippolythus a Lapide denied that the Emperor was a sovereign and held
that the Empire was an aristocracy of the princes; while Samuel Pufen-
dorf, in his De Statu Imperii Germanici (1667), aimed at a reconciliation of
the different factors wielding influence in the Empire and declared that it
was an ‘ irregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile'. It certainly was
irregular, although perhaps not a monster but a marvel. So was the fact
that, in spite of all tensions and rivalries, the internal frontiers fixed by the
Peace of Westphalia remained substantially the same for more than half
a century — only France continued to encroach upon Imperial territory in
the west.
Even more stable proved the frontiers drawn between the warring
creeds. Protestantism was eliminated from the Habsburg lands, Bohemia,
and the Upper Palatinate, but the secularised abbeys and bishoprics were
not restored. After 1648 very few German princes exercised their right of
driving out those of their subjects who adhered to a religion different from
that of the ruler. In their depopulated lands subjects were valuable, and
the more enlightened princes tried to attract immigrants even if they
belonged to different religious persuasions; the persecuted Protestant
sects and the Jews found a home in Brandenburg and elsewhere. Many
princes were not strong enough, or not fanatical enough, to enforce their
religion upon their territories. Thus the Calvinist Electors of Brandenburg
and the landgraves of Hesse-Cassel ruled over Lutheran principalities
and did not attempt to make Calvinism the State religion. 1 When later
in the century the Electors Palatine and the Electors of Saxony became
Roman Catholics, 2 Protestantism remained the dominant religion of their
principalities. The Counter-Reformation did not advance any further.
Religious passions had cooled and self-interest dictated the adoption of a
more tolerant course. Thus, to a very large extent, the religious map of
modem Germany is that of 1648.
Many problems remained unsolved, or it took many years before a
solution emerged. The restoration of law and order was a difficult task.
The mercenary armies were paid off although there was extremely little
money. But what should be done with the mercenaries, and how could
they be fitted into civil life? There were as yet no standing armies into
which they might be absorbed. During the disorders resulting from the
war many people had taken to brigandage and crime, or had learned to
live by their wits; bands of former soldiers roamed the country. Certain
1 For further details, see above, ch. vj, pp. 126-7.
2 See below, pp. 452, 454.
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
Estates of the Empire co-operated to suppress lawlessness and disorder.
The continuing war between France and Spain and that between Sweden
and Poland which broke out in 1655 absorbed some mercenaries who had
not learnt any other trade; so did later the wars of Louis XIV. Even
greater difficulties stood in the way of economic recovery. It was not only
the fact, which has been emphasised so often, that the mouths of all the
great rivers flowing through the Empire were controlled by foreign powers.
It was not only that trade had dwindled or sought alternative routes to
avoid the disturbed areas. It was, above all, the egotism and mutual
jealousy of the princes and towns which, under the influence of the ideas
of ‘mercantilism’, imposed more and more barriers upon trade and
enterprise, erected innumerable customs stations at the frontiers of each
principality and along the course of all the rivers, levied new impositions
and taxes which drove away trade and delayed the recuperation by
decades. If France recovered surprisingly quickly from long periods of
war and civil war, this was partly due to the enlightened policy of a
centralised government. The political disunity of Germany had grave
consequences in the economic field.
A Political Discourse on the real Causes of the Rise and Decline of Towns,
Countries and States, published in 1668 by Johann Joachim Becher,
pointed to the wealth which the United Provinces derived from the sea:
they would never have amassed their riches if they feared the sea as much
as the German nation did. ‘The result is that in Germany there is hardly
any trade and enterprise, all commerce is ruined, no money is to be found
either among the great or among the small people.’ In the same year the
officials employed to levy the wine-duty at Ottingen in Bavaria attributed
the steep decline in the yield of the duty to the fact that ‘in previous good
years the sweet wines had been sent not only into the country, but fre-
quently also into Austria, Bohemia and to Prague, even to Cracow in
Poland, but at present times sales had nearly ceased on account of the
manifold wars and widespread deaths which had caused the country’s
ruin and scarcity of money ’, and the same applied to the sale of Austrian
wines. 1 At Munich, Augsburg, Speyer, Frankfurt and Leipzig the price of
rye in the 1660’s was between 13 and 34 per cent, and the price of oats
between 15 and 29 per cent below the pre-war level. The depopulation of
the towns, which lasted for a long time after the end of the war, led to a
sharp decline of the consumption of corn, to a shrinking of the com trade
and to a severe fall in the price of land. In Berlin the price of rye and
wheat remained depressed throughout the second half of the seventeenth
century.
There can be no doubt that wide areas of Germany not only suffered
severely from the war and its aftermath, but also lost a large part of their
1 State Archives Munich, ‘Aitbayerische Landschaft’, no. 1993: report to the deputies
of the Estates supervising the levy of the wine-duty of 20 November 1668.
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THE EMPIRE AFTER THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
population. While the towns could protect themselves more easily against
hostile forces, they suffered all the more severely from outbreaks of plague.
Austria, the Tyrol, Salzburg and Switzerland were hardly touched by the
war and their population grew. Large parts of north-west Germany —
Slesvig, Holstein, Lower Saxony, Oldenburg, Westphalia and parts of the
Rhineland — did not suffer much depopulation. Even in Silesia and
Bohemia it probably amounted to only 20 per cent. But other parts fared
much worse. In the various districts of Brandenburg between 15 and
60 per cent of the farms were deserted in 1652, on an average perhaps
about 50 per cent. Berlin lost only 25 per cent of its population, but
Potsdam and Spandau over 40, and the town of Brandenburg over
60 per cent. In six small towns of the Old Mark (to the west of the Elbe)
2444 hearths were counted in 1567 : a century later there were 1021 . In its
most important town, Stendal, 2980 children were bom during the first
decade of the seventeenth century : during the seventh decade the number
was 969 ; and Stendal was a town which had been neither conquered nor
looted. But it has to be remembered that the decline of the Brandenburg
towns had started in the sixteenth century. At the other end of Germany,
in Wiirttemberg, over 41,000 destroyed houses and bams were counted in
1652, and about one-third of the arable land was deserted, a total of
3°9.957 Morgen (about 241,000 acres). Fifty-one local districts reported
that they had had 58,865 burghers before the war, but that only 19,071
remained; the other twenty-four districts merely reported that they had
lost 18,546 burghers. The town of Nagold lost only 8 per cent of its
population, but Urach 75 per cent. In Pforzheim in Baden so many
houses were still deserted in 1 667 that the margrave was forced to intervene.
The population of Munich fell from 18,000 or more to 9000. Among the
south-western territories the Palatinate and Wiirttemberg suffered most;
among those in the north-east, Mecklenburg and Pomerania. Many
inhabitants migrated to the safer north-west where Hamburg and Bremen
grew in importance, exporting com overseas and receiving English and
Dutch goods; the destruction of Magdeburg contributed to the rise of
Hamburg, its rival. Ulm and Nuremberg, while declining in population,
to some extent profited from the influx of Austrian Protestants and of the
capital which they brought with them. In Augsburg, however, 143 people
had paid between 50 and 100 guilders each in taxes in 1617, but in 1661
there were only 36; while the number of those paying more than 100
guilders fell from 100 to 20, although taxation was enforced more strictly.
Thus no generalisation is possible, but the picture is grim enough.
The depopulation of the countryside had divergent effects in the dif-
ferent parts of Germany. In Bavaria the nobility, whose income consisted
of peasant dues and rents, became impoverished and dependent upon
money-lenders. Even the estates of the wealthier families were burdened
with heavy debts. Those of the less well-to-do often came into the hands
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of the monasteries, of speculators, of officers or officials who invested
their capital in real estate. At the diet of 1669 the nobility strongly com-
plained about the buying-up of noble estates : if any came on the market
the religious foundations offered the best price; their ready cash was
pushing aside the nobility. Only a minority were still able to live according
to their custom and to send their children abroad ‘to learn the noble
exercises ’. On account of the prevailing low com prices demesne farming
held no attraction for the landlords ; a tendency in that direction did not
really develop and was later reversed. The Bavarian peasants, on the other
hand, benefited from this situation. Because of the scarcity of tenants the
landlords were forced to grant them better conditions. As the prelates put
it in 1669, if they did not want their farms to become completely deserted,
they had to accept whatever they were offered ; if they wanted to put new
tenants on their deserted lands, they had to improve their legal position,
to allow them freedom from dues for many years, and to be content with
what the peasants were willing to pay.
Exactly the opposite occurred in Brandenburg, Pomerania and Meck-
lenburg, where demesne farming had become prominent and the position
of the peasants had deteriorated since the fifteenth century. The depopula-
tion forced the nobles to take much more deserted peasant land under
their own ploughs because they were unable to find new tenants. The
peasants were burdened with much heavier labour services because their
number had shrunk and the demesnes had grown. Their children were
forced to serve as menials or labourers on the estate. The peasants with
their entire families were not only tied to the soil — that had already
happened in the sixteenth century — but many became personally unfree:
even their bodies belonged to their masters ( Leibeigenschaft ). They
equally controlled their peasants’ private lives ; their consent was required
for marriages; many peasants were sold or exchanged like chattels.
During the following decades many more peasants were evicted or bought
out. In Brandenburg the size of the noble demesnes grew by about 30 per
cent during the second half of the seventeenth century. In Lower Saxony,
on the other hand, a strong and independent peasantry came into being at
that time, because this area had lost only a small part of its population and
benefited by immigration from the devastated districts. A purposeful
government policy supported this tendency, while in north-eastern
Germany the governments only too easily gave way to the demands of the
nobility, which aimed at a complete subjugation of the peasantry and a
further extension of its demesnes. It was only along the coast of the
Baltic — in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, the duchy of Prussia,
Poland and Livonia — where there were easy facilities for export, that the
Gutsherrschaft (large noble estates producing corn for the market with
the help of the labour services of serfs) was established in the course of
the seventeenth century. Even in Saxony and Magdeburg, which were
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equally ‘colonial’ in character and possessed easy facilities for sending
com down the Elbe, this was not the case. There peasant farming remained
the preponderant form of agriculture, and serfdom never assumed the
rigours which it acquired in the territories along the Baltic coast. There
the local nobility did not become all-powerful, but its influence was
balanced by that of the towns, especially of Leipzig whose fairs acquired
European importance. Bohemia and Moravia, on the other hand,
resembled the territories of the north-east, from which they were separated
by Saxony and Silesia. The Bohemian nobility also possessed large
estates, demesnes, sheep-farms, breweries and fish-ponds, which were
farmed with labour services; the peasants were serfs and many had to
serve as often as they were bidden by their masters, while in the Austrian
lands their services were more limited, usually to twelve days in the
year. 1
Wherever demesne farming was less prominent and the noble estates
small and scattered — as in western and southern Germany — serfdom had
in practice disappeared and the labour services often been commuted into
quit-rents. There the depopulation of the Thirty Years War could not lead
to a revival of the manorial system, but the peasants’ position continued
to improve. These enormous differences in the social development can be
illustrated by the figures of population density. About 1700 Brandenburg
had only about 30 inhabitants per English square mile, the duchy of
Prussia only 28, and Pomerania only 19; but Bavaria had about 73,
Hanover 63, Magdeburg 78, Saxony 93, and Wtirttemberg 105 inhabi-
tants per English square mile, the latter figures approximating to those of
the Netherlands and France and surpassing those of England and Wales.
Clearly the condition of the peasantry was worst where the population
was smallest. Not that the Thirty Years War had caused this uneven
distribution of the population ; it merely enhanced a tendency which had
existed for centuries.
In north-eastern Germany there was no improvement in the condition
of the peasantry in the century following upon the Thirty Years War. In
the New Mark of Brandenburg, in the early eighteenth century, labour
services of three days a week were considered a light burden : usually, they
amounted to four, and often to six days a week, from sunrise to sunset,
which left the peasants far too little time for their own farms. About two-
thirds of the total arable land belonged to the nobility and another
quarter to the royal domains. In the Brandenburg districts of Beeskow
and Storkow 429 peasants were counted in 1746, while there had been 814
1 Wolf Helmhard von Hohberg, Georgica Curiosa. Das ist: Umstandlicher Bericht und
klarer Unterricht von dem Adelichen Land- und Feld-Leben. . . (Nuremberg, 1682), 1, 46, 53,
150. It is interesting that this Austrian nobleman considered the serfdom of the Bohemian
peasants and their unlimited labour services as something that ‘is not customary in the
German lands’, thus not taking into account the conditions in north-eastern Germany.
For further details, see below, ch. xx, pp. 480-1.
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
before the Thirty Years War; but the number of cottagers had increased
from 172 to 828. In eastern Pomerania there were 65 14 peasants under the
nobility at the end of the sixteenth century, but only 3419 about 1670 and
3584 in 1718. Many peasants escaped across the Polish frontier to seek
better conditions. In 1684 a clergyman painted the following picture of
the local peasantry:
The peasants are indeed human beings, but somewhat more churlish and uncouth
than the others In his movements, he would only seldom think of his hat and
take it off, . . . but if he does so he turns it round like a potter’s wheel, or spits into
his hands and polishes it When they eat they do not use a fork, but they dip
their five fingers into the pot If soldiers steal they do it out of extreme need;
but most peasants who help themselves do it out of malice It is also well known
that those who keep on good terms with the vicar are maltreated by the other
peasants, for they give them all kinds of bad names, call them traitors, lickspittles,
toadies, talebearers The peasants have that in common with the stockfish: these
are best when beaten well and soft. The dear peasants too are only well-behaved
when fully burdened with work; then they remain well under control and timid 1
And in 1710 a high Prussian official, von Luben, reported to his king:
Because in some places there is strict personal serfdom [Leibeigenschaft] and those
of the nobility do not want to abolish it but want to retain the great power over their
subjects, they plague them with heavy Egyptian services, with manifold com and
other carrying duties, harsh punishments and other dues to such an extent that they
remain poverty-stricken; one cannot squeeze the contribution and other taxes out
of them, or they run away; if they do so they are fetched back and things go worse
with them; the people are punished and treated cruelly.. . .They cannot obtain
justice at the governments and regional and local courts because the nobles sit in
them, and these have an interest on account of their own estates and peasants and
do not want to prejudge their own cases The rents, services, dues, billeting and
contribution have been increased so often that the people can hardly maintain
themselves; therefore the serfs have long been poor and get poorer still and remain
so, and finally there is nothing left but to run away 2
Yet the pictures drawn of east-German noblemen were hardly more
flattering. In a satirical story from Silesia there occurs this description of
a young noble by his own mother :
The rogue knows already that he is a Junker; therefore he does not want to learn
anything, but rather rides about with his stable-boy But in the end 1 will have
to buy a spelling-book for him — If only it did not cost anything and the learned
chaps need not have so many books I have always heard that in other countries
there are not such proper noblemen as we have them 3
1 Des Neunhautigen und Haimbiichenen schlimmen Baurenstands und Wandels Entdeckte
Ubel-Sitten und Lasterprob, von Veroandro aus Wahrburg (1684).
2 Friedrich Wilhelm I. in seiner Tatigkeit fur die Landescultur Preussens, Publicationen
aus den K. Preussischen Staatsarchiven, 11 (Leipzig, 1878), pp. 213, 216-17: relation of
14 October 1710.
2 Paul Winckler, Der Edelmann, in Verlegung Christoph Riegels (Nuremberg, 1697).
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Another critic of the nobility wrote:
If one visited another the beer mug immediately appeared on the table; it went
round without distinction, whether the guest was thirsty or not If they arrived
in the afternoon the drinking started right away, with medium-sized mugs which
held almost a jug; then the host drank to the guests, emptying either the whole
mug, or half a mug, and the guest had to respond. Thus they got drunk before the
evening, and in the early morning some drank ordinary spirits, others warm beer
with eggs and ginger 1
Other observers too commented on the excessive drinking habits. From
Hamburg it was reported about 1650 that ‘nowadays people first send for
spirits before they go to church’ on a Sunday. 2 And from Ratisbon the
English envoy. Sir George Etherege, wrote in 1686:
the Gentlemen of this Country go upon a quite different Scheme of Pleasure. . .
and they take more care to enlarge their Cellars than their patrimonial Estates.
In short. Drinking is the Hereditary Sin of this Country, and that Heroe of a Deputy
here, that can demolish (at one Sitting) the rest of his Brother Envoys, is mentioned
with as much Applause as the Duke of Lorain for his noble Exploits against the
Turks and may claim a Statue erected at the public Expence in any Town in Ger-
many They are such unmerciful Plyers of the Bottle, so wholy given up to what
our Scots call Goodfellowship, that ’tis as great a Constraint upon my Nature to
sit out a Night’s Entertainment with them, as it would be to hear half a score long-
winded Presbyterian Divines Cant successively one after another — 3
A wide gulf separated the nobility from the commoners, and this
distinction was equally upheld by the urban patrician families. At
Augsburg, Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Ulm the noble families were
strictly secluded from the burghers. At Nuremberg they considered it
dishonourable to engage in commerce. At Frankfurt the Society of Old
Limpurg demanded from new members proof of eight noble ancestors
and abstention from all commerce. Apart from these old noble families
there were many recently ennobled ones : officers, officials and merchants,
whose families engaged in ostentatious display. They drove round in
gilded carriages, their wives would wear lace only from Paris or Venice,
their houses were luxuriously furnished. Those whose patents of nobility
dated from an earlier time looked down upon the newcomers. An
eighteenth-century writer, Johann Michael von Loen, critically compared
the attitude of the German nobles with those of England, where ‘ even the
sons of the greatest peers were not ashamed to become advocates, so that
later they could become magistrates and be elected to parliament’, and
those of Spain, where ‘young noblemen from the oldest families took
doctorates...’. He also remarked upon the decline of the German
nobility, which went hand in hand with more splendour and greater
1 A. Tholuk, Vorgeschichte lies Rationalismus, 11, 2 (Berlin, 1862), 197-8.
a Ibid. 11, 1 (1861), 121.
* The Letterbook of Sir George Etherege, ed. Sybil Rosenfeld (London, 1928),
pp. 413-14.
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
expenditure, so that many noblemen had to enter military services. ‘For
this there is now the best opportunity because the miles perpetuus et
mercenarius has been introduced in all European States n The eco-
nomic difficulties which undoubtedly faced the nobility in the period after
the Thirty Years War indeed explain the willingness with which that of
Brandenburg and Pomerania entered the Hohenzollem army and became
professional officers. The same was the case in some other German
principalities. In Bavaria, however, the impoverished nobility showed a
clear preference for civil employment and eagerly sought State and court
offices and sinecures. As there were about 500 or 600 courts in Germany,
not counting those of the Imperial Knights, there were indeed many
openings for impecunious noblemen.
If, in many parts of Germany, the nobility was a declining class and had
to seek offices and preferments, the towns were not in a much better
position. With the exception of Hamburg and Frankfurt, which grew con-
siderably in importance, the Free Imperial Cities were mere shadows of
the past. After the loss of the Alsatian cities to France their number was
fifty-one, the large majority situated in the south-west of Germany. Most
of them were very small and unable to hold their own in the struggle with
the principalities which surrounded them. But even the more important
Imperial Cities — -Augsburg, Nuremberg, Ulm, Ratisbon in the south and
Cologne, Aachen, Bremen, Liibeck in the north — found it difficult to
adapt themselves to changed conditions. The south-German towns were
hard hit by the decline of the trade with Italy and the bankruptcies of the
great banking houses of the Fuggers and the Welsers. The north-German
towns suffered from overwhelming Dutch, and to a lesser extent English,
competition. Foreign merchants exported German raw materials and
produce and imported colonial and foreign goods. The Hanseatic towns
had long declined under the double impact of foreign and noble competi-
tion. They no longer sent their own ships across the seas, but were satisfied
if they could act as intermediaries between foreign visitors and the hinter-
land. Bremen and Cologne had to fight hard to preserve their status of
Free Imperial Cities. The power of the princes and the rise of the princi-
palities made any progressive development of the Free Imperial Cities
impossible: hemmed in on all sides they survived, undiminished in num-
ber, until the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, but the days of their
power and splendour were past. Even the economic recovery of the
eighteenth century did not lead to their revival.
The decline of the Free Imperial Cities did not result in a progressive
development of the towns situated within the principalities and fostered
by their princes. Their trade and industry had suffered severely. In
Munich, for example, the number of cloth-makers fell from 148 in 1618 to
56 in 1649, that of cloth- and linen- weavers from 161 to 82, that of hat-
1 Johann Michael von Loen, Der Adel (Ulm, 1752), pp. 271, 290.
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makers from 23 to 9, that of tailors from 118 to 64. After the end of the
Thirty Years War the Electors of Bavaria made strenuous efforts to revive
the Bavarian cloth industry, but with little success, and the number of
cloth-makers declined further. The heavy taxes and monopolies imposed
by the princes only too often hampered the recovery of trade and enter-
prise. The import of many foreign goods was prohibited, as was the export
of raw materials, such as wool or hides, before there were any domestic
industries which could absorb these materials or supply the internal
demand. Even if certain articles could be produced locally, the foreign
goods were often cheaper and better. Thus many of the prohibitions and
monopolies had to be rescinded, only to be reimposed later, with the same
disastrous results. In Brandenburg the export of raw wool was prohibited
no less than ten times during the reign of the Great Elector, but — as the
nobility was exempt from this prohibition — it proved ineffective. The
repeated prohibitions of the import of iron and metal goods were equally
disregarded, even by the State officials. The trade down the Elbe was so
burdened with tolls that even com, ‘the soul of commerce’, was shipped
along different routes and transport over land became cheaper. The Elbe
tolls at Lenzen were farmed out for some years, with very bad results for
trade; but matters did not improve when they were again managed by
State officials. The Great Elector considered these heavy tolls entirely
justified; three conferences summoned to discuss the Elbe tolls produced
no result because, against the advice of his privy councillors, he refused to
make any concessions. The commandants of Frankfurt-on-Oder and
Spandau levied their own duties on passing carriages and ships, and others
did the same with travellers, in spite of official prohibitions. The number
of ships putting into Konigsberg declined steeply on account of new
duties and tolls imposed by the government.
Equally bad was the effect of the new excises, the favourite instruments
of seventeenth-century governments. In Saxony an excise was introduced
in 1640 and not rescinded after the end of the war. Therefore many goods
by-passed Saxony and were transported along alternative routes. Silk and
other costly goods from Italy went north through Thuringia, linen from
Bohemia and Silesia went through Brandenburg (before the excise was
introduced there). It was in vain that the Estates of Saxony complained
that the excise caused the ruin of the country, especially of the cloth and
linen industries, and favoured Saxony’s neighbours. It was equally in
vain that the Hanseatic and the south- and west-German towns repeatedly
declared that under these conditions their trade with Leipzig could not
revive. There was much passive resistance, but the excise remained ; only
on home-produced goods was it rescinded temporarily, but reintroduced
in 1681. By that time the excise had also been introduced in Brandenburg,
with even more negative effects. For there it was not introduced for the
country as a whole, but only for the towns, so that each small town was
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surrounded by artificial customs barriers and the excise had to be levied
at the town gates. Thus urban trade and enterprise were burdened with
the new tax, while those carried on outside the town walls remained free
and the tax-exemption of the nobility was preserved. It also meant that
the towns had to carry a disproportionate share of the taxes : it is not sur-
prising that their recovery was so slow. And this was the system which
was gradually extended from Brandenburg to the other Hohenzollem
territories. Other principalities were more fortunate. Following the
Brandenburg example, in 1700 an excise was also introduced in the duchies
of Jiilich and Berg on the lower Rhine ; but there the Estates and the towns
got it rescinded after a few years, for urban enterprise was declining and
trade was migrating into neighbouring territories.
The towns within the principalities also suffered from the efforts of
their rulers to extend their sway over the towns. Since 1648 Arch-
bishop John Philip of Mainz tried to enforce his prerogative over the town
of Erfurt in Thuringia which vigorously resisted all his threats and even
the ban of the Empire. In 1664 he decided to use force and, supported by
France and the Rhenish Alliance, laid siege to Erfurt. A month later the
town surrendered, rendered homage to John Philip and accepted a
princely garrison. Two years later the Great Elector forced Magdeburg to
do the same. In a similar fashion the city of Munster was subjugated by
Bishop Christopher Bernard von Galen and the town of Brunswick by the
dukes of Brunswick-Liineburg. The opposition of Konigsberg, the capital
of the duchy of Prussia, and of the towns of the duchy of Cleves, which
resisted the imposition of arbitrary taxes and the depredations of the
military, was broken by military force. The introduction of the urban
excise in the early eighteenth century spelled the ruin of their old pros-
perity. Within twelve years the most important town of Cleves, Wesel,
lost over a quarter of its inhabitants and all the towns of Cleves over
1 1 per cent of theirs.
It is true that the rise of Hamburg continued during this period, that
the fairs of Leipzig became a focal point of exchange between east and
west and south; that the Silesian linen industry continued to prosper; but
these exceptional cases merely emphasise the general stagnation. The con-
tinuing decline of many German towns, often caused by government
action, provided great opportunities for foreign merchants and financiers.
Already before the Thirty Years War Dutch merchants had penetrated up
the Rhine and from the Baltic ports into the hinterland. After the war
their influence increased and at certain places became predominant. The
Dutch with their capital resources and trading connections, with their
many ships and cheaper freight rates, were at an enormous advantage
compared with the small merchants of petty German towns. The Thirty
Years War and the collapse of the great banking houses had ruined all
credit and consumed most of the capital. Timidity and narrow-minded-
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ness were the characteristics of the day. For his naval and colonial
enterprises the Great Elector had to use Dutch experts and sailors, Dutch
companies and financiers, because no such resources were available in
Brandenburg and Prussia. For the same reason he welcomed Jewish
merchants, especially if they also represented Dutch interests. Thus Moses
Jacobson de Jonge in 1664 received an important privilege which entitled
him to take up residence at Memel — at a time when the Jews were still
excluded from the duchy of Prussia. He soon established a flourishing
trade with Poland, Lithuania and Livonia, almost monopolised the highly
important trade in salt and successfully competed with the local mer-
chants; in 1694-6 he paid 80 per cent more in customs duties than all the
merchants of Memel together. No wonder that they as well as the Estates
of Prussia violently complained about the newcomer. In Cleves the
Gomperz family played an important part in financial matters, advancing
sums to the government and to the Estates, anticipating the yield of taxes,
and meeting the arrears of French contributions. In 1700 Ruben Elias
Gomperz was appointed chief tax-collector for the principalities of Cleves
and Mark, and under Frederick William I members of the same family
were again employed on official business. Because there were so many
courts and so many impecunious princes, because their splendour and
their ambitions were continuously growing, because they had to have
standing armies which had to be supplied with food and equipment,
hundreds of court Jews had to try to meet the ever-increasing demands of
the princes.
Thus the Thirty Years War exercised a profound influence on the course
of German history, especially in the social and economic field. In popular
opinion it became the cause of all evils ; even the deserted villages of the
later Middle Ages were attributed to destruction by the Swedes or to some
other calamity of the great war. Naturally, the popular literature of the
time, as well as of modem times, tended to over-emphasise the horrors and
the hopelessness of the situation. If this picture is too one-sided and
biased, so are the attempts of some modem historians to ‘debunk’ the
Thirty Years War and to attribute much of the bleakness to later propa-
ganda. It has also been alleged that contemporaries did not think of the
war as one war, but divided it into a number of separate wars. But it can
be proved that one name — ‘the great German war’, or ‘the Thirty Years
War’ — was used soon after the fighting had come to an end. It is true, of
course, that the political disunity of Germany was not caused, but merely
exacerbated, by the Thirty Years War, and that some of the negative
features described above were due to political disunity. But it also
remains true that the social and economic decline was at best local before
the outbreak of the war and was made much more general by the war. It
is equally true that the rise of the western European countries began long
before the outbreak of the war; but it seems at least possible that
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Germany might have been able to participate in that rise if the war had
not intervened. In the sixteenth century Germany was still a flourishing
country; it took her a century or longer to reach once more the level of
development she had attained before the outbreak of the Thirty Years
War.
If the economic and social development of Germany during the second
half of the seventeenth century presented a picture of almost unmitigated
gloom, the same is not entirely true of the constitutional field. The institu-
tions of the Empire — in spite of all its decline and disintegration — con-
tinued to work better than might have been expected. A certain stability
was reached which was to persist into the eighteenth century; and no
serious efforts were made to upset the balance of forces which had come
into being. Perhaps it was the continuous threat from France which
brought about some cohesion between divergent forces, or the pressure
from the Turks ; but the latter were far less dangerous than they had been
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the siege of Vienna was only a
passing episode. Louis XIV always had his partisans and clients in
Germany : in that respect French power was an element of disruption, and
not of cohesion. Only certain parts of the Empire were threatened by
foreign foes. Yet it was not only the States of the Rhineland which com-
bined against France — on the contrary, there Louis XIV found many
more or less willing ‘allies’ — and not only those of the south-east which
fought against the Turks. If one remembers that the Empire had about
360 different Estates — not counting the 1500 Free Imperial Knights — it
seems a miracle that some unity was preserved in spite of so much disunity.
Not all the 360 Estates were represented in the Imperial Diet, which met
at Ratisbon and debated upon matters such as the coinage, sumptuary
laws, measures against vagabonds and beggars and, above all, military
affairs and taxes to be levied for defence or other purposes. For, with the
sole exception of a levy for the maintenance of the Imperial High Court,
there were no permanent Imperial taxes, but only the ‘Roman months’
voted by the Diet. 1 Another weakness of the Imperial Diet was that it
possessed no executive authority if some of the Estates declined to carry
out decisions taken by the Diet. In that case, there was only the possibility
of a trial before the Imperial High Court which was notorious for its
delays and for creating complications. The Diet consisted of three houses
or ‘colleges’. The first was that of the Electors: in 1648 their number was
increased to eight, but the Elector of Bohemia (the Habsburg Emperor)
did not exercise his electoral dignity. There were thus four Catholic
Electors — Bavaria and the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and Trier —
1 Originally levied to finance Imperial expeditions to Rome, the ‘Roman months’ since
the sixteenth century were grants made by the Diet for the Imperial army, which were
repartitioned among the Estates of the Empire according to a fixed quota.
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and three Protestant ones — Lutheran Saxony and two Calvinists, Branden-
burg and the Palatinate. In the Palatinate, however, a Catholic line of
Electors succeeded in 1685, and twelve years later the Elector of Saxony
also became a Roman Catholic. This was balanced only to some extent by
the creation of a ninth Electorate for Hanover — granted in 1692 by the
Emperor acting on his own authority, without any consultation with the
Electors or other princes, who had no alternative but to acquiesce. Thus
at the end of the century there were only two Protestant Electors, against
six Catholics (excluding Bohemia). The Elector of Mainz was the leader
of the corpus catholicorum, and the Elector of Saxony of the corpus
evangelicorum; but in religious controversies neither side could outvote
the other.
The second house was that of the princes, separated into ecclesiastical
and temporal ‘benches’. There were thirty-seven ecclesiastical and sixty-
three temporal votes, six of which were composite: the Swabian and the
Rhenish prelates and four groups of Imperial Counts each exercising one
vote. In this house also the Catholics had a majority, but not a large one.
The third house was formed by the fifty-one Free Imperial Cities, thirteen
of which counted as Catholic, thirty-four as Protestant, and four as
‘mixed’. Their influence, however, was very restricted because the Diet of
1653 granted them a votum decisivum only after an agreement had been
reached between the two upper houses, so that they could no longer
influence the outcome in case of a disagreement between the houses. As
the English envoy. Sir George Etherege, wrote in 1685, ‘the deputies of
the towns serve only for form’s sake, and have never any business trans-
mitted to them till the other two Colleges have agreed. . . V In that case
the deputies of the cities had practically no alternative but to consent, for
it was an accepted principle that none of the houses could be outvoted by
the others. As far as Imperial taxation was concerned, it became equally
accepted since 1653 that a vote of credit required unanimity, for — as a
decision of the Lower Saxon Circle put it in 1652 — it would be ‘entirely
contrary to natural freedom. . .if someone by his vote could decree what
someone else should give’. 2 The Emperor Ferdinand HI had to give up his
plan of making majority decisions in questions of taxation binding on the
minority: the Estates’ liberties triumphed once more and the opposition
of the princes, led by Brandenburg, prevailed.
In 1654 the princes gained another point: paragraph 180 of the Recess
drawn up at the conclusion of the Diet stipulated that the subjects of each
Imperial Estate were obliged to make grants in aid to their prince or lord
with respect to the manning and maintenance of the essential fortresses,
places and garrisons. If this was a blow aimed at the local Estates, which
in most principalities still exercised the power of the purse, a further step
1 The Letterbook of Sir George Etherege, p. 61.
2 Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte (Freiburg, 1904), vi, 377.
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in that direction was made after the death of Ferdinand III in 1657. Before
the young Leopold was elected Emperor he had to make far-reaching
concessions. The Electors of Brandenburg and Cologne, involved in
complicated struggles with their own Estates, demanded that these should
maintain the fortresses with their own resources and have no right to dis-
pose of local taxes without the consent of the prince in question. Branden-
burg in addition requested that the Estates should be forbidden to meet
without a summons by the ruler or to make a complaint about him to the
courts of the Empire; while the Palatinate, Saxony and Trier were satisfied
with the preservation of the status quo. Saxony in particular opposed the
prohibition of appeals to the Imperial courts, from which it would not
have benefited : at that time only the possessions of the houses of Saxony
and Bavaria, of the Electors Palatine and of Mainz had received a
privilegium de non appellando which exempted them from the jurisdiction
of the Imperial courts; but of the Hohenzollem territories such an
exemption had been granted only to the Brandenburg Mark, not to their
other possessions. Yet, if Leopold wanted to be elected Emperor, he had
to accept the Electors’ conditions. Hence it was stipulated that the local
Estates were not entitled to refuse contributions to the ‘necessary’ fort-
resses and garrisons, to meet without a summons, or to dispose indepen-
dently of local taxes. If in such cases they sent complaints to the Imperial
courts, these should not be heard, nor should complaints against
paragraph 180 of the Recess of 1654. If the Estates possessed privileges
contrary to these stipulations they should be revoked, and equally alli-
ances or unions between the Estates of several principalities. Only
thereafter was Leopold elected Emperor by a unanimous vote. Hence-
forth the princes possessed a legal title which they could always employ
against their Estates. Contrary to this prohibition, however, the Imperial
courts, especially the Aulic Council, continued to entertain complaints of
local Estates against their rulers: a factor which was to be of great
importance. 1
The dangers threatening from the Turks and domestic circumstances
induced the Emperor to summon another Diet. It was opened early in
1663 and, after deliberations stretching over more than twelve months,
consented to support the Emperor against the Infidel with an army of
about 30,000 men. But only one-third of that number finally appeared in
the field, and they participated only in the last stages of the campaign.
The discussion of other subjects was even more prolonged — so much so
that no Recess was ever concluded : the Diet became permanent, consisting
of envoys of the princes, whose instructions they had to seek on each issue.
It thus became a congress of diplomats wrangling over questions of rank
and procedure, as described in letters of Sir George Etherege from
Ratisbon in 1687-8 : ‘The business of the Diet for the most part is only fit
1 See below, pp. 455-6.
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to entertain those insects in politics which crawl under the trees in
St James’s Park. . And four months later: ‘The cabals and intrigues
for and against the Count de Windisgratz’s pretensions have been the only
business of the Diet this long while ’ After another five months
nothing had changed: ‘Those who are unacquainted with the proceedings
of this assembly would wonder that, where so many ministers are met and
maintained at so great a charge by their masters, so little business is done,
and the little that is so slowly . . . The lot of the English envoy, who dis-
liked the drinking bouts of the Germans and found their ladies ‘so
intolerably reserv’d and virtuous. . .that ’tis next to an impossibility to
carry on an Intrigue with them . . . ’, was not an enviable lot. 1 What
heights of folly the system could reach may be illustrated by the behaviour
of the representative of the Elector of Mainz in 1701. When leaving his
coach at the quarters of the Imperial representative he demanded to be
led to him through a secret staircase because he had found in the files that
this had been the previous practice. When he was informed that this was
impossible for the simple reason that the secret staircase no longer existed,
but had disappeared during building operations, he insisted nevertheless
and declared that under these circumstances he did not dare to seek an
audience, but would write to his master for instructions.
When the War of Devolution broke out in 1667 2 the Imperial Diet was
confronted with the question whether the Spanish Netherlands, which
formed the ‘Burgundian Circle’ of the Empire, should be protected. The
French ambassador used all the means at his disposal to prevent such a
decision, while the Imperial representative, the archbishop of Salzburg,
tried to counteract his influence. Meanwhile Louis XIV conquered town
after town, but the Imperial Diet remained silent. In September the
Electors pronounced in favour of mediation, ignoring the question
whether the Spanish Netherlands formed a part of the Empire. Among
the princes the Salzburg resolution which affirmed the latter point
obtained only thirty votes, while forty-one were in favour of mediation
and thirteen without any instructions. During the following weeks both
sides continued their efforts : as the influence of the French ambassador
was gaining ground, the archbishop of Salzburg did not persist and the
matter was quietly dropped. It was only in 1674, after new acts of aggres-
sion, that the Imperial Diet finally declared war on France. But even then
only part of the Estates furnished the contingents to the Imperial army
which this decision obliged them to provide, and the Franconian and
Swabian Circles as well as Bavaria protested against the billeting of the
Emperor’s forces within their frontiers. After the Peace of Nymegen (1679)
no fewer than six of the Electorates — Bavaria, Brandenburg, Cologne,
1 The quotations are from The Letterbook of Sir George Etherege, pp. 210, 270, 328,
416.
’ See above, ch, ix, pp. 210-12.
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Mainz, Trier and Saxony — belonged to the French party, seeking to
achieve their aims through an alliance with Louis XIV or compelled by
their geographical position to remain on good terms with him. After 1680,
however, the new Electors of Bavaria and Saxony adopted a more friendly
policy towards Vienna and left the leadership of the French party to the
Great Elector of Brandenburg.
It was during these years, when the power of Louis XTV stood at its
height, that real progress was made by the Imperial Diet with the creation
of an army to defend the Empire. An Imperial law of May 1681 fixed the
figure of the simplum of the army at 40,000 — 12,000 horse and 28,000
foot-soldiers. The total was then distributed among the ten Circles of the
Empire, the Austrian Circle having to contribute about 20 per cent, and
the Burgundian, Lower and Upper Saxon, Swabian and Westphalian
Circles about 10 per cent each. Within each Circle, the various Estates had
to furnish their military contingents, the details of distribution being left
to the Estates of the Circle in question. This meant that in the Swabian
Circle, which had by far the largest number of Estates, contingents had to
be provided by ninety-one different Estates, including thirty-one Free
Imperial Cities. At the same time an Imperial War Chest was set up. The
Emperor in person could command the Imperial army or nominate an
Imperial Field-Marshal, while the Imperial Diet appointed a number of
generals. The fortresses which Louis XIV had built on the right bank of
the Rhine — Philippsburg and, after 1697, Kehl — were maintained and
garrisoned as Imperial fortresses after their restoration by France. The
simplum of 1681 could be increased in case of need, and was indeed
augmented immediately by 50 per cent to 60,000. By a law of November
1702 it was increased to 120,000, 80,000 of which were to be kept in
permanent readiness ( duplum ). Difficulties were, however, raised by those
Imperial Estates which already possessed a standing army of their own,
for example Brandenburg, because they did not want to furnish their con-
tingents to the armies of different Circles. In practice, therefore, the whole
organisation only functioned in the western Circles of the Empire which
were directly threatened by Louis XIV. In 1697 the Bavarian, Franco-
nian, Swabian, Westphalian and two Rhenish Circles concluded an
Association which undertook — on the basis of the law of 1681 — to raise
an army of 60,000 men, reduced to 40,000 in peace-time, and regulated its
organisation in detail. It was this army which for many years defended
the Rhine frontier against France and garrisoned the Imperial fortresses
on the Rhine. It thus proved that there was no need for each principality
to acquire a standing army of its own, that the Empire was capable of
defending its own frontiers, and that the institution of the Circles could be
of great practical importance. Some of the Circles successfully dealt with
matters of trade, customs, coinage, building of roads, law and police,
health and welfare. In the south-west they took steps to bring about
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greater uniformity in legal and economic affairs — steps which were
essential for the progress of the most divided region of the Empire.
The other institution of the Empire which showed signs of real life in
the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the Aulic Council at
Vienna. For the subjects and Estates of the princes the Imperial courts
were the remaining link with the Empire because to them they could
complain or appeal, even against their prince, unless he had been granted a
privilegium de non appellando, and that applied only to four or five princes,
such as those of Bavaria and Saxony. The Aulic Council ( Reichshofrat ) was
steadily gaining in importance because it dealt with cases more quickly and
efficiently than the Imperial High Court, was freer in its rules of procedure
and had better means of enforcing its decisions. Thus its jurisdiction was
preferred by many parties. It was competent to deal with questions of
fiefs and privileges and was the last court of appeal within the Empire. It
depended entirely on the Emperor, who nominated its president, its vice-
president, and its eighteen councillors, six of whom had to be Protestants.
In 1654 he issued on his own authority regulations for the procedure of
the Aulic Council which excluded the Imperial Estates from all participa-
tion and influence. The jurisdiction of the Aulic Council was instrumental
in protecting the subjects of several German princes against the worst
excesses of princely despotism and prevented the dukes of Mecklenburg,
Wurttemberg, and Jiilich and Berg from making themselves absolute. Its
field of competence, however, was progressively curtailed in the eighteenth
century by the grant of privilegia de non appellando to several princely
houses, even outside the Electoral group.
The other Imperial court, the Reichskammergericht (Imperial High
Court), was steadily declining in importance. Until 1688 it was situated
at Speyer, and after the second devastation of the Palatinate it was trans-
ferred to Wetzlar. It was the last court of appeal for the subjects of the
princes, but a court of first instance for those who were not the subjects of
any prince, for example Free Imperial Knights, and in cases of denial of
justice. It stood much less under the influence of the Emperor, who
nominated its president, and much more under that of the Imperial
Estates. Twenty-four of the judges were to be nominated by the Electors,
twenty-four by the Circles, and only two by the Emperor. Because of lack
of funds, however, the number of judges never exceeded eighteen and was
often much smaller. The Imperial High Court was notorious for its
dilatory procedure: cases dragged on for decades, and sometimes for
centuries, without ever reaching a conclusion. The devastation of the
Palatinate and internal strife further contributed to its decline and to the
rise of the Aulic Council, which was favoured by the Emperor. An Imperial
Deputation was appointed to speed up the appeals pending, but did not
start its work until 1767. Apart from the two Imperial courts, there was an
Imperial Chancery, under a Vice-Chancellor, which served the Emperor as
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a secretariate for purposes of the government of the Empire — as distinct
from that of his hereditary territories, which were administered by organs
such as the Imperial Privy Council, the Privy Conference, and the Court
Chancery. 1
If the Empire had almost lost the character of a State, the weight of
political life had shifted into the principalities. The major princes,
adopting the principles of absolute government, tried to gain more power
at the cost of weaker neighbours and of their own subjects. Their policy of
consolidation and of becoming ‘more considerable’ was bound to lead to
conflicts with those institutions which acted as a brake on such endeavours,
especially their own Estates. In most principalities these possessed far-
reaching privileges, above all the power of the purse which made the ruler
dependent on their voting of taxes, whether it was for his growing court
expenditure, for his military forces, or for the waging of war. Further-
more, in many principalities the local Estates had acquired a strong
influence in the field of administration: by taking over more and more
debts of the prince they had gradually built up their own organs of
administration, with their own officials and permanent committees, side
by side with, or superseding the machinery of the State. In some princi-
palities they had acquired the privilege of periodical meetings, or could
meet without a summons by the ruler. Such privileges were extremely
irksome to princes who wanted to be independent of any fetters and
aimed at the building up of their own administration. This tendency
clearly emerged before the election of Leopold I to the Imperial throne,
but many princes were not satisfied with the concessions gained. They
wanted to extend the rights obtained through the Recess of 1654 to all
their military enterprises and to see the Estates’ power of the purse abol-
ished. In 1670 the Imperial Diet passed a proposal to this effect, but the
Emperor refused to give his assent. Therefore the princes with particu-
larly strong inclinations towards absolute government — Bavaria, Bran-
denburg, Cologne, Palatinate-Neuburg, etc. — in June 1671 concluded an
alliance to help each other if their Estates resisted them by force of arms,
or if they refused to pay what was necessary for defence purposes or the
conservation of fortresses, or what the Empire and the Circles had agreed
upon. Against their own Estates the German princes found it easy to
co-operate: thus the Great Elector of Brandenburg and the Count Pala-
tine Philip William, the duke of Julich and Berg, jointly tried to achieve
the repeal of the hereditary unions which bound the Estates of Julich,
Cleves, Berg and Mark together.
It was the example of Louis XTV and of his unlimited power which
inspired many German princes. If they could not hope to rival the splen-
dour of the French king, if their armies remained woefully inferior to his,
they at least had to build a little Versailles on the banks of the Neckar or
1 For these Habsburg organs of government see below, ch. xx, pp. 477, 485.
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THE EMPIRE AFTER THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
the Spree. John George II of Saxony built an opera-house and main-
tained an orchestra with one conductor-in-chief, two assistant conductors,
four Italian composers, and forty-six singers. In Wurttemberg in 1684 a
French opera with a ballet was enacted by the court under the title
Le rendezvous des plaisirs. A visit to Versailles became almost obligatory
for the sons of the German princes, and their example was soon followed
by the higher nobility. In 1671 the president of the Wurttemberg privy
council, full of pride, described to the deputies of the Estates the grand tour
of the Wurttemberg princes in France. After their arrival in Paris the two
princes
were immediately visited in their lodgings by the highest grandees and frequently
entertained magnificently in their palaces; until finally Marshal de Turenne con-
ducted them in his carriage to an audience in the royal Louvre where they were
received in the most friendly fashion by His Majesty; before they were admitted
to his presence they were informed that the King would not wear his hat during
the audience, but would talk with them bareheaded; and thus it was done in his
private closet where he entertained them for a full half hour discoursing with them
most graciously, which otherwise was quite unusual 1
The sun of Versailles lent lustre even to very minor stars. French fashions
and French modes of government penetrated across the Rhine, and
French money was an extremely powerful influence at many a
princely court. In Berlin, after 1679, the French ambassador. Count
Rebenac, wielded enormous influence and distributed his largesse among
the servants of the Great Elector, exactly as the French ambassador
to the court of St James’s did among the supporters and opponents of
Charles II.
Among the German principalities the four lay Electorates continued to
be the most important ones. Yet during this period the Palatinate lost the
leading position which it had occupied for so long. When the Elector
Charles Louis in 1649 returned to his devastated lands he used the
methods of absolute government; he tried to revive trade, to direct the
economy, to improve education, and to settle the religious strife. He also
founded a standing army — which in wartime grew to over 8000 men — and
a military administration with a war council. For their maintenance
permanent taxes on wine, fruit and meat were introduced. The Elector
was strongly opposed to all privileges and to any curtailment of the power
of the State. Under his strict rule the country began to recover from the
ravages of the Thirty Years War, but in 1673 the taxable capital and
property were estimated at only about one-quarter of the figure of 1618;
in the different local districts it varied from one-sixth to three-fifths of the
pre-war figures. Yet the worst was still to come. In 1685 the Simmem
branch of the Electors Palatine died out and was succeeded by the Neu-
burg branch which also ruled in the duchies of Jtilich and Berg. Already
1 State Archives Stuttgart, Tomus Actorum, vol. lxxi, fo. 27o:reportof 13 Februaty 1671.
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in 1674 the Palatinate had been terribly devastated by the French; now
Louis XIV claimed it in the name of his brother who was married to
Elisabeth Charlotte, the sister of the last Elector of the Simmem line.
The result of the ensuing war was a second devastation, even more
thorough and deliberate than the first. Among the many towns and
villages destroyed was the capital, Heidelberg, with its ancient university
and beautiful palace. From these repeated blows the Palatinate was
unable to recover. In addition, the new Elector, John William, was a
Catholic and soon began to oppress the Calvinists, many of whom sought
refuge abroad. Thus the Palatinate lost its leading position among the
German principalities and became one among many minor States; even
in the eighteenth century it was unable to resume its former place.
The other Wittelsbach Electorate, Bavaria, emerged from the Thirty
Years War considerably strengthened, in spite of the ill-effects of the war.
Maximilian I was the acknowledged leader of the Catholic League, gained
the Electoral dignity and conquered the Upper Palatinate, where he sup-
pressed the Estates and introduced the Counter-Reformation. In Bavaria
also he followed the principles of absolute government. As he wrote
shortly before his death in the ‘Information’ which he left to his wife: in
almost every country there was a clash of interests between the prince and
the Estates, for they always tried to increase their privileges and liberties
and to escape the burdens and taxes to which the prince was entitled by
right, or at least to whittle them down by all kinds of means; therefore, it
was not advisable to hold diets without a highly important cause, because
the Estates only used them to raise their grievances and new pretensions. 1
In spite of the Estates’ demands, no diet was summoned after the end of
the war, but they were successful in achieving the disbanding of the army,
with the exception of only a few garrisons. Maximilian’s successor,
Ferdinand Maria (1651-79), continued his father’s methods of govern-
ment. Its heart and soul was the privy council ; the other central authori-
ties, for financial, military and religious affairs, were made subordinate
to it and became its executive organs. For the supervision of the local
authorities and matters of ‘police’, agriculture, trade and industry, the
Church and the schools, the Rentmeister were used as the long arm of the
government, their manifold functions corresponding to those of the
intendants in France. The Elector administered the country as though it
were his private estate and ruled his subjects as if he were their guardian.
Through the introduction of new taxes and the judicious use of monopo-
lies the electoral revenues grew considerably and were partly used to
encourage music and the arts. A standing army of a few thousand men
came into being, but only during the wars against Louis XIV did it reach a
1 Christian Ruepprecht, 'Die Information des Kurfiirsten Maximilian I. von Bayern
fur seine Gemahlin vom 13. M&rz 1651 OberbayerischesArchivfurvaterlandischeGeschichle,
LIX (1895-6), p. 317 .
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more substantial size. After many years and repeated petitions of the
Estates’ committee Ferdinand Maria consented to summon a diet. It met
in 1669, after an interval of fifty-seven years: the last in the history of the
ancien regime. The Estates granted 372,000 guilders a year for nine years
and took over most of the Electoral debts. They further empowered their
twenty deputies to grant another 200,000 guilders in case of need and, if
this was insufficient, to summon the Estates; but some days later the
Elector changed this clause by a decree which empowered the deputies to
decide with him what was necessary and to co-opt new members in case
of any vacancy. Thus the Estates’ deputies continued to meet several times
each year, to grant the taxes required by the government, to raise griev-
ances, and to supervise the financial administration of the Estates and the
work of their officials. Ferdinand Maria’s successor. Max Emanuel
(1679-1726), paid even less regard to the privileges of the Estates: he
considered them a useless institution and an obstacle to his ambitious
foreign policy. During the War of the Spanish Succession he sided with
Louis XIV, was put under the ban of the Empire and, after Blenheim,
driven out of the country. 1 After his restoration in 1714 he continued his
absolutist policy; but he did not dispense with the remaining rights of the
deputies of the Estates.
Even more than Catholic Bavaria, it was the two Protestant Electorates
in the east of Germany, Brandenburg and Saxony, which came to the fore
in the period after the Thirty Years War. More will be said about
Brandenburg in another chapter,® but at this time Saxony was still the
much more developed, wealthy and populous of the two. As a result of
the war it had acquired Lusatia and the secularised bishoprics of Meissen,
Merseburg and Naumburg. Soon a much greater prize, Poland, was to
loom large in the policy of the Electors. But it was a gain of very doubtful
value, for vast sums of money had to be spent in Poland, partly on bribes
to the electors; and the kingdom absorbed the energies of the House of
Wettin which thus could not concentrate on the development of their own
State — the policy to which the Hohenzollems adhered so faithfully.
Poland and the wars in which the Electors found themselves involved
because of Poland — especially that against Sweden in the early eighteenth
century, during which Saxony was occupied by the Swedish army® —
contributed to the decline of Saxony. From the point of view of Branden-
burg it was extremely lucky that the ambition of the Great Elector and his
eldest son to become king of Poland was not fulfilled. In contrast with
Brandenburg and with Bavaria, the Estates of Saxony did not lose their
powers : on the contrary, the enormous debts of the Electors forced them
to make new concessions to the Estates. In 1661 their deputies were
granted the right of free assembly on their own initiative to discuss
1 For these events, see vol. vi, ch. xni. * See below, ch. xxm, pp. 543 ff.
* See vol. vi, ch. xx.
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important affairs; if the Elector attempted to change the estabb'shed
religion, Lutheranism, the Estates’ votes of credit were to be null and void.
The religious issue stiffened their resistance to absolute monarchy; for in
1697 Frederick Augustus I, to secure the Polish Crown, became a Roman
CathoUc and thus lost his rights of supreme headship over the Saxon
Church which were transferred to the privy council. He had to sell or
pawn many lands and prerogatives; but he made his capital, Dresden, a
centre of the arts and founded the Meissen porcelain manufactory, the
first in Germany, soon to become famous. A standing army of about
10,000 men came into being in the later seventeenth century. During the
wars against the Turks, in which it took a prominent part, it was increased
to nearly 20,000: less only than that of Brandenburg. Yet the growth of
the miles perpetuus did not destroy the power of the Estates, and diets
continued to be summoned at fairly regular intervals. Their influence only
declined when, early in the eighteenth century, the general excise was
introduced on the pattern of Brandenburg. The need of money and more
money, the religious opposition, and the Electors’ preoccupation with
Poland prevented them from following the Hohenzollems’ example more
closely; the standing army remained comparatively small, and Saxony
remained a constitutional monarchy — in contrast with the kingdom of
Prussia.
The development of Hanover, which in 1692 became the youngest
Electorate, was considerably delayed by conflicts among ducal brothers,
so common in German princely families, and the resulting divisions of
their territory. New partitions were effected in 1641 and in 1665; but
in 1683 Ernest Augustus of Hanover introduced primogeniture for his
possessions, and in 1705 his son, the Elector George Louis, succeeded in
reuniting the ducal territories, nine years before he mounted the British
throne. In the later seventeenth century dukes John Frederick and
Ernest Augustus of Hanover built up a strong army which enabled them
to participate actively in the wars against Louis XIV and the Turks and
the rebellious Hungarians. The elevation of Ernest Augustus to the
Electoral dignity by the Emperor Leopold was a reward for services
rendered. The former also supported the expedition of William of Orange
to England. The administration of the Electorate was carried on, under
the Elector’s control, by the privy council, with four colleges responsible
for finance, law, war, and the Church respectively. The court was under
the influence of the philosopher Leibniz. 1 The ruling group, however,
consisted of the nobility, and this prevented the establishment of a com-
pletely absolute government. This tendency was strongly reinforced in the
eighteenth century, because the Electors were so often absent abroad and
the government was in the hands of regents drawn from the native
nobility. All important posts were reserved to a few families, social dis-
1 For Leibniz, see above, ch. iv, pp. 82-5; ch. v, pp. 1 14-17; ch. vi, pp. 145—6.
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tinctions were rigidly upheld, and the Estates dominated by the nobility
in practice ruled the country. Even the historical divisions remained a
reality ; the Estates were divided into seven different corporations for the
several duchies and counties which made up the Electorate. Exactly as the
preoccupation of the Electors of Saxony with Poland prevented them
from playing a leading part in Germany, so the preoccupation of the
Electors of Hanover with Britain prevented them from concentrating on
the development and unification of their German possessions.
In the duchy of Holstein, to the north of Hanover, on the other hand,
the Estates lost all their influence in the later seventeenth century. There
the joint rulers — the dukes of Holstein and the kings of Denmark — used
to the full the rights granted by the Imperial Recess of 1654, 1 which were
backed by a decision of the Lower Saxon Circle. The rulers maintained
that they alone were entitled to decide upon the maintenance of fortresses
and garrisons, while the Estates declined to grant them the necessary
means. After the accession of Duke Christian Albrecht in 1659, however,
a tax for military purposes was demanded regularly every spring: if the
Estates did not consent to it, it was nevertheless levied by the government.
When the Estates referred to their privileges the government declared that
these constituted only a private law, while the decisions of the Empire and
the Circle were fundamental and public laws. When the Estates insisted
that their grievances be redressed first, the rulers refused and proceeded
with the compulsory levies. In 1675 the last diet was summoned: after
renewed disputes it was adjourned, never to meet again, and the Estates
lost all their influence. Very similar was the development in the mar-
graviate of Baden-Durlach, in the south-west of Germany, which had
suffered severely from the Thirty Years War and was to suffer even more
during the wars of Louis XIV. There also the diet met for the last time in
1668: without any opposition it transferred the power of the purse and
the administration of the debts to Margrave Frederick VI. The constitu-
tion was not abrogated, but the diet was no longer summoned because its
usefulness had disappeared. The country was ruled by the methods of
patriarchal absolutism which eliminated all conflicts and promoted eco-
nomic recovery. A memorandum drawn up in 1771 pointed out correctly
that the very name of the Estates had long been forgotten.
In some other principalities, however, exactly as in Saxony, the Estates
during and after the Thirty Years War succeeded in retaining and even
extending their powers. In the duchy of Mecklenburg, to the east of
Holstein, the dukes also claimed the right of levying taxes for military
purposes without a grant by the Estates. In 1659-63 these complained to
the Emperor Leopold and the Aulic Council where their privileges were
confirmed. Encouraged by this support from the highest authorities of
the Empire they refused in 1671 to pay the aid granted by the Imperial
1 See above, p. 445.
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Diet to the United Provinces, whereupon the dukes levied it by force.
When the Estates renewed their complaint to the Aulic Council it was
rejected ; yet the conflict went on. In 1698 the Aulic Council decided that,
if the issue was a tax for the Empire, the Estates were obliged to pay.
Three years later it was agreed that for such purposes 120,000 thalers
were to be levied annually, one-third of which was to be given by the
nobility, the towns, and the ducal domains respectively; and this was con-
firmed by the Emperor, but rejected by a part of the nobility. New conflicts
broke out during the War of the North in which Duke Charles Leopold
participated on the side of Peter the Great and Russian troops occupied
the duchy. 1 The Estates refused to grant the large sums demanded and
Rostock, the only important town of the duchy, again appealed to the
Aulic Council; but in 1715 the town had to surrender and to accept the
ducal conditions. In the same year the Emperor Charles VI, after peti-
tions of the Mecklenburg Estates and the Elector George Louis of
Hanover, decreed an ‘Imperial Execution’ against Charles Leopold and
entrusted its execution to the princes of Hanover and Brunswick. Their
troops occupied the duchy after the departure of the Russian troops and
virtually deposed Charles Leopold. By a decision of the Aulic Council
the government was in 1728 entrusted to his brother, and the constitution
was restored with the help of the Estates. In the middle of the eighteenth
century the conflict was renewed; but the Estates, backed by the Aulic
Council, were again victorious over the duke and their privileges remained
in force.
If the Mecklenburg Estates were dominated by the nobility, the oppo-
site was true of the duchy of Wiirttemberg in the south-west: there the
Estates consisted only of the deputies of about sixty towns and fourteen
secularised monasteries and were unicameral — a very exceptional develop-
ment, due to the fact that the noblemen had become Free Imperial
Knights. In Wiirttemberg also the main issue between the dukes and the
Estates was the question of the standing army. The Estates strenuously
refused to grant the means for its maintenance in peace-time and achieved
its reduction to a few hundred men as soon as the wars came to an end.
When Duke Frederick Charles in the 1690’s transformed the militia into a
regular army the Estates declared that this was unconstitutional and com-
plained to the Aulic Council, but without much success. The conflicts
continued in the eighteenth century during which the Estates at first
steadily lost ground, but finally succeeded in re-establishing their influ-
ence, thanks to support from the Aulic Council and the kings of Prussia
and Britain. In Wiirttemberg also, the fact that, from 1733 onwards, the
Estates were fighting against Roman Catholic dukes strengthened their
resistance to despotic government.
Thus constitutional developments varied enormously in the different
1 For these events, see vol. vi, ch. xx.
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parts of Germany, with repercussions which have lasted into the twentieth
century. But the events in the Palatinate and Baden, in the south-west,
and in Mecklenburg, in the north-east, show that it was by no means the
south-west which remained more constitutional and ‘liberal’ and the
north-east which became more autocratic. The divergent developments
cannot be explained by factors of geography, nor by differences of social
structure; for the Estates of Mecklenburg — like those of Poland and of
Hungary — were dominated by the nobility, and those of Wurttemberg by
the burghers of small towns. Only in Saxony did there exist a balance
between the nobility and the towns, among which Leipzig was by far the
most important. In Brandenburg and Prussia, on the other hand, where
the nobility was as predominant as in Mecklenburg, absolute government
triumphed, and a standing army was established which was far larger than
in any other German principality. This was due, above all, to the deter-
mined policy of the Hohenzollerns : their single-mindedness helped them
to overtake the Wittelsbachs and the Wettiners during the century fol-
lowing upon the Thirty Years War. The personal factor was of vital
importance in this respect. Outside Prussia, the standing armies remained
small, and the Estates with their ancient liberties and constitutional rights
disappeared only in a few of the other principalities. Wherever their
influence was preserved, and wherever that of the army did not permeate
the whole State, a tradition remained alive which was to facilitate the
establishment of modern self-government and representative institutions.
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CHAPTER XIX
ITALY AFTER THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
B efore the Peace of Westphalia Italy was an organic part of a vast
network of European interests. It was the centre of the Catholic
Counter-Reformation and one of the main bases of Spanish imperi-
alism. Spanish-Catholic political interests were connected with widespread
economic interests in which the shipping, banks, industry and merchants
of Genoa, Milan, Tuscany, Naples and Sicily played an important part.
The Peace of Westphalia maimed Spanish imperialism and halted the
Counter-Reformation. As an indirect result, Italy was relegated to the
margins of European history and confined to a very minor place among
the countries of Europe. Thus the Peace of Westphalia was also a date of
fundamental importance in the history of Italy, although its effects came
to be seen only with the passage of time. It did not at once terminate the
conflicts in which the peninsula and its States were involved, the war
between France and Spain and the War of Candia between Venice and the
Turks; nor did it change the political map of Italy, the essential features
of which were settled by the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis (1559) and modi-
fied in some details by subsequent events, in particular by the Treaty of
Cherasco (1631).
Spain remained mistress of her traditional domains, Milan, Naples,
Sicily and Sardinia. By means of a series of strategic points she retained
control of the Tyrrhenian Sea, which was vital to imperial communications,
and of the States along its coast. The Genoese republic, with its own
territories of Liguria and Corsica, continued to be a pawn of Spanish
policy ; it was watched over by the strategic strongholds of the Marquisate
of Finale (on the Ligurian coast and under direct Spanish rule) and of
the Lunigiana valley (between the Po valley and the Tyrrhenian, an area
dotted with fiefs of the Malaspina family, who were theoretically vassals
of the Empire, but in practice dependants of the Spanish governor at
Milan). From the Lunigiana the Spaniards also controlled the very small
neighbouring States, the Cybo principalities of Massa and Carrara and
the republic of Lucca, and overlooked the grand duchy of Tuscany.
Moreover, by the direct control of the Presidios dependent upon the vice-
roys of Naples, and indirect control of the principality of Piombino (a fief
of the Ludovisi since 1634), Spain also contained Tuscany from the south.
Finally, these strongpoints safeguarded the route from Naples to Genoa
and indirectly dominated the Papal State itself.
To the massive Spanish power in Italy was opposed a French power
which was unimpressive territorially, yet most effective in political and
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military respects. By the Treaty of Cherasco France had acquired the
fortress of Pinerolo and the adjacent Alpine valleys in Piedmont. She was
thus able to send troops into Italy at any time and control the duchy of
Savoy, with its territories of Savoy, Piedmont, Nice and an enclave in
Liguria which included Oneglia. The Duchess Christina, regent for her
son Charles Emanuel II of Savoy (1637-75), who was a minor, had hoped
that the terms of Cherasco would be revoked at Westphalia, but in vain.
On this point the Emperor Ferdinand HI had yielded to the claims of
France, and Piedmont remained a battlefield for the French, who occupied
the citadel of Turin, and the Spanish forces of Caracena, the governor of
Milan, which garrisoned Vercelli. All the minor States of Italy turned
upon the axis of this great struggle, some supporting France and others
Spain, according to their interests and ambitions.
During the decades which preceded the Peace of Westphalia the policy
of the Italian States had been one of internal consolidation which often
took the form of the absorption of smaller principalities, anachronistic
survivals of the Middle Ages, by their larger neighbours. This process
naturally caused a number of local conflicts which in their turn became
linked with the major struggle between France and Spain. There was a
sort of permanent ‘cold war’ between pro-Spanish Genoa and the House
of Savoy, vassals of the French, who at the same time were in open con-
flict with the Gonzaga-Nevers, the ducal family of Mantua and Mon-
ferrato, over the latter territory which lay in a strategic position between
Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria. France, by the Treaty of Cherasco,
had become the arbiter of this quarrel and reduced Savoy to vassalage,
meanwhile guaranteeing Monferrato to the Gonzaga-Nevers on condition
of their ceding Alba and Trino to their opponents. Spain, however,
opposed this solution by force of arms, and the Gonzaga-Nevers, in spite
of their French origin, were unwilling to give up Alba and Trino. Accord-
ingly, in 1648 the French were garrisoning Casale, the largest fortress of
Monferrato, and Caracena was trying to win over Charles II of Gonzaga-
Nevers (1647-75). At the same time he was playing a similar game with
Francis I d’Este (1629-57), duke of Modena, utilising his aspirations to
the principality of Correggio. France, for her part, was supporting
Ranuccio II Famese (1646-94), duke of Parma and Piacenza, in his con-
flict with the Holy See which sought to deprive him of his fief of Castro
in Latium.
Furthermore, Mazarin had sent an expedition to Tuscany to occupy
Piombino and the Presidios. But Ferdinand II de’ Medici (1621-70),
grand duke of Tuscany, continued to incline towards Spain while pre-
serving a cautious neutrality. He thus hoped to continue the traditional
policy of his ancestors, who had sought to strengthen their frontiers in
the two strategic zones of the Lunigiana and Maremma. In the latter
the Medici had acquired the counties of Pitigliano (1604) and Santa
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Fiora (1634), while in the former they coveted Pontremoli, formerly a
fief of the Malaspina, the key to the Cisa Pass and hence to the entire
valley.
The Holy See also had followed a policy of annexation, acquiring the
duchies of Ferrara (1598) and Urbino (1631), and now aspired to Castro.
But Innocent X Pamphili (1644-55) was above all interested in securing
peace among the Catholic powers in order both to re-establish papal
prestige, which had suffered seriously at Westphalia, and to oppose the
Turks who were attacking the Venetians on the island of Candia (Crete). 1
Thus the Holy See and the republic of Venice were moving towards an
agreement upon political objectives — in spite of the many conflicts of the
past — inasmuch as both desired peace and a common Christian front
against the Porte. For the present Venice conducted a neutral policy
between France and Spain and aimed at profiting from its traditional
friendship with the former as well as from the latter’s traditional hatred
of the Turks.
It was Richelieu’s intention that the Treaty of Cherasco should enable
France to follow an ambitious policy of conquest in Italy similar to that
of her sixteenth-century kings. But in 1 648 the country lacked the material
means needed for such a policy. Both France and Spain were so exhausted
by the Thirty Years War that their struggle in Italy was reduced to an
inconclusive exchange of blows. During the first phase, the crisis of the
Fronde 2 enabled the Spaniards to drive the French from the key positions
of Casale and Piombino and to attach several Italian rulers to their party
by satisfying their ambitions. Thus Innocent X was able to gain Castro
from the pro-French Farnese (1649), while Ferdinand II de’ Medici was
freed from the threatening presence of the French at Piombino and in
1650 obtained Pontremoli. Caracena allowed Francis I d’Este, who
became an ally of Spain, to annex Correggio, and Charles II of Gonzaga-
Nevers also joined the Spanish side and in 1652 regained Casale. Immedi-
ately after this, however, Mazarin returned to power (1653) and succeeded
in neutralising these Spanish successes; but he in his turn failed to per-
suade the Italian States to form a league sufficiently strong to withstand
the Spaniards. This was largely due to the refusal of the Venetians to
participate; they were too fully occupied in Candia to be willing to enter
into adventures elsewhere. Thus the Cardinal had to seek decisive diplo-
matic success elsewhere, and he turned towards an alliance with
Cromwellian England.
At this point there occurred an episode in Italy which was small in itself,
but important for Anglo-French relations owing to the great impression
it made on English opinion. In 1655, with the connivance of Mazarin, the
House of Savoy dispatched a military expedition against its own Pro-
1 See below, pp. 461-3. * See vol. iv, ch. xvi.
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ITALY AFTER THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
testant subjects in the Waldensian valleys of the Piedmontese Alps. This
force ravaged the valleys, committing every sort of atrocity, but was
unable to extinguish all resistance. The ‘Waldensian Easter’ enraged
opinion in the Protestant countries, and Milton celebrated the victims in
one of his best known sonnets. Cromwell threatened to send a fleet to
carry out reprisals on the Italian coast, and Mazarin, in order to gain his
friendship, offered to act as mediator between him and the court of Turin.
The Waldensians were permitted to live in peace, and for the first time
Italy became aware of the growth of British naval power. Meanwhile
Mazarin had also succeeded in winning over the duke of Modena, who
married one of the cardinal’s nieces and broke off relations with Caracena.
Under the duke’s command a French army advanced into Lombardy and
won several victories, but in mid-campaign (1658) Francis died, and
Mazarin, successful in Flanders thanks to his alliance with England, did
not press home his Italian offensive.
The Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) restored the status quo in Italy. Spain
retained her traditional territories, and France kept Pinerolo and with it
control over the duchy of Savoy. The Spaniards evacuated Vercelli and the
French had already left the citadel of Turin. Yet it was clear that the
political and military weakness of Spain was increasing, and no less evi-
dent was the decline in the prestige of the Holy See: Pope Alexander VII
Chigi (1655-67) was not admitted to the negotiations preceding the peace.
The pillars of the old Spanish-Catholic regime in Italy were silently
crumbling, and no new order was forming to take its place. Although
during the following decades Spain’s decline continued, France made no
serious attempt to drive Spain from Italy and take her place in governing
its people. There was not even any attempt to link Italian interests organi-
cally with her own. She was content to remain encamped at Pinerolo and
occasionally to frighten the States of the peninsula by a display of military
strength. It was enough that Italy should remain inert, creating no prob-
lems, while French armies pursued more important objectives in other
theatres of war. Thus from 1659 to 1690 Italy lived through a time of
political immobility during which, at least to all outward appearances,
virtually nothing happened.
This political immobility was emphasised by the fact that Venice, the
strongest of the autonomous Italian States, was so involved in the War of
Candia that for a quarter of a century it could play no part in Italian
affairs. In contrast with Spain’s bellicose policy of crusading against the
Turks, Venice had always followed a pacific policy towards them, based
on rational considerations of commercial utility. Moreover, as a tradi-
tional opponent of Spanish-Catholic policy, Venice had obviously bene-
fited from the weakening of Spain and the papacy brought about by the
Thirty Years War. Before she could reap any reward from this, however,
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she was suddenly forced into an all-out war against the Porte which caused
a decisive change in Venetian history.
Despite Venice’s care to avoid any quarrel with the Turks, she had not
been able to prevent the Porte sending a strong expedition in 1645 to
capture the Venetian island of Candia. The time was a favourable one for
the Turks, since the Christian powers were too deeply occupied with
fighting against each other in the Thirty Years War to send aid to Candia;
in particular Spain, the most formidable opponent of the Ottomans in the
Mediterranean, had been bled white. Venice itself was quite unprepared
from the military point of view. As if this were not enough, the bad
Venetian colonial administration had so enraged the population of Candia
that they took no part in the defence of the island. Within a few weeks
(June-August 1645) the Turks captured the town of Canea and then
advanced across the island to besiege its principal strongpoint, Candia itself.
In similar circumstances Spain and the papacy had in the past succeeded in
raising a really large force; this time they could only send a fleet of
Neapolitan, Tuscan, papal and Maltese ships under Niccolb Ludovisi,
prince of Piombino, and this fleet arrived too late to save Canea. Neither
then nor later was any really effective help given to the Venetians. Even
after the Peace of Westphalia Venetian diplomacy could not achieve any-
thing; Spain and France continued to fight each other, and the formation
of a united Christian front remained a hopeless dream.
Candia was the richest of Venice’s possessions, however, and the
republic was unwilling to yield it. The Venetians were prepared to adopt
all sorts of financial expedients, such as opening the patriciate to anyone
offering large money payments, in order to equip a considerable fleet.
With this fleet they won back control of the sea, cut off the Turkish forces
besieging Candia and, from 1647 onwards, carried the war into the enemy
camp. In 1648 they captured Clissa in Dalmatia, and they defeated
the Turkish fleet on a number of occasions. In the great battle of the
Hellespont (1656) they lost their captain-general, Lorenzo Marcello, but
destroyed a large part of the enemy fleet and blockaded the Turks in the
Dardanelles. A Turkish attempt to break this blockade met with a bloody
defeat in 1657, and Lazzaro Mocenigo, the new captain-general, even
succeeded in forcing his way into the Straits. His advance on Con-
stantinople was finally checked by the fire of coastal batteries which
destroyed the Venetian flagship and caused the death of her courageous
commander.
After twelve years of war, however, the republic was exhausted. It had
failed to break the unrelaxing determination of the Turks, who had been
reinvigorated by the iron government of Mehmed Kopriilii. 1 The Venetian
fleet lost command of the sea, and what had been a war of movement
became a war of attrition around besieged Candia, in which the Ottoman
1 See below, ch. xxi, pp. 507-9.
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Empire enjoyed the advantage of possessing superior resources. The
Venetians fought on for another twelve years with extraordinary tenacity,
but the War of Candia became for them what the War of the Netherlands
had been for Spain, a bottomless pit into which they poured men, money
and supplies endlessly and without effect.
The efforts of Venetian diplomacy were of no avail. The Peace of the
Pyrenees (1659) left Spain exhausted, and Mazarin’s France sent only a
single contingent which Francesco Morosini, the new captain-general,
contrived to add to the garrison of Candia, but to small effect (1660). The
outbreak of a new war between the Porte and the Habsburgs at last
brought a certain relief to Candia since it drew off the bulk of the Ottoman
forces. In 1664, however, the Venetians were again fighting alone, suc-
coured only by the meagre aid offered by some Italian princes, such as
Charles Emanuel II of Savoy, who hoped in this way to induce the
Venetians to accord him equality of treatment with crowned heads. Later
Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi (1667-9) recruited assistance zealously
among the Italian and Imperial States and by the Treaty of Aix-la-
Chapelle (1668) 1 put an end to the War of Devolution in the hope
that Louis might at last place France’s formidable military strength at
the service of the Christian cause. But her commercial interests in the
Levant were too important for her to be willing to become the bulwark
against the Turks which Spain had been. French intervention was limited
to the dispatch of a single force, which fought under the papal flag to avoid
an open rupture with the Porte; its principal purpose was to gain prestige,
or rather perhaps to exert pressure on the Porte to improve the terms on
which the French were permitted to trade. The French abandoned Candia
after a few months, leaving Morosini alone with a mere three thousand
survivors, exhausted by fighting and the deprivations which they had
suffered. In September 1669 Morosini had at last to evacuate Candia,
after a siege of twenty-three years in which about 100,000 men died.
The Venetians certainly put up a very strong defence, and the terms
granted to them on their surrender were fairly favourable; they retained
the fortresses of Suda, Spinalonga and Carabusa, as well as Clissa and the
Ionian island of Zante. Serious accusations, however, were made against
the men regarded as responsible for the defeat; among those brought to
trial was Morosini, but he was acquitted. The war had consequences far
deeper than these superficial manifestations of discontent. Venice had
entered it as a great trading power and as a firm adversary of the Habs-
burgs and of the papacy. In the course of the war she lost almost all her
Levant trade to the French, English and Dutch and was transformed into
a pillar of Catholicism and an ally of the Habsburgs. It was symptomatic
of this change that the Jesuits, who had been driven from Venice half
a century before, were readmitted in 1657 to ingratiate the city with
1 See above, ch. rx, p. 213.
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Alexander VII. Equally significant was the transfer of Venetian capital
from shipping and trade into land. The patriciate was ceasing to be an
oligarchy of adventurous capitalists and becoming instead an aristocracy
of conservative landowners.
During this period the decline in the papacy’s moral and political
prestige was becoming more marked. This decline was already evident by
1648, and the Peace of Westphalia was in practice a defeat for the Holy
See. Innocent X had been the butt of much bitter criticism and many
pasquinades for his weakness, in particular on account of his avaricious
relatives. It was notorious in Rome that one could obtain anything from
the papal administration so long as one satisfied the thirst for money of
his arrogant sister-in-law, Olimpia Maidalchini. Venality and maladmini-
stration were rampant in the Papal State. While Bernini, the pope’s
favourite architect, continued to embellish St Peter’s with the products of
his dazzling genius, there was miserable poverty in the Roman Campagna,
the prey of malaria and brigandage. None of these matters improved
under the following popes.
Relations between the Holy See and France were unfriendly, partly on
account of the affair of Cardinal de Retz, archbishop of Paris, who was
persecuted by Mazarin because of his participation in the Fronde. In
order to placate the pope, Mazarin gave his agreement to the papal con-
demnation of Jansenism (1653). 1 Jansenist agitation did not come to an
end, however, and the problem of Franco-papal relations was threatening
to become a permanent danger to the popes. On the death of Innocent X
the successor elected as Alexander VII was the Sienese Fabio Chigi (1655),
who had been the papal nuncio at the congress of Westphalia; his support
of the Society of Jesus and his ideological views exacerbated French
Gallicanism. He issued frequent condemnations of Jansenism, received
Christina of Sweden with great pomp after her conversion from Pro-
testantism and, as we have seen, secured the return of the Jesuits to
Venice. But he fell foul of Mazarin, who was personally hostile to him,
resented the reception given in Rome to Cardinal de Retz when he fled
from France, and objected to Alexander’s appeals to the French clergy to
support his attempts to make peace between the Christian monarchies.
The Holy See thus suffered another moral defeat at the Peace of the
Pyrenees (1659) and failed to provide help for the Venetians. Worse was
to follow after Mazarin’s death and Louis XIV’s assumption of personal
power. In 1682 a futile little brawl between some papal soldiers and
servants of Crequi, the French ambassador to the Holy See, was made the
pretext for a violent onslaught: Louis occupied Avignon and even
threatened to send an army into Italy. So weak was the pope’s position
that in 1684 he had to accept an utterly humiliating settlement of this
1 See above, ch. vi, p. 133.
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quarrel, and his brother, Mario Chigi, was sent to France to make Louis
a formal apology.
Louis XIV’s overbearing pressure was felt in the conclave after
Alexander VU’s death in which another Tuscan was elected: Giulio
Rospigliosi, who took the name of Clement IX (1667). Clement was the
last of those Tuscan administrators who had played so great a part in
papal history. Thanks to his diplomatic ability and gentle character
Clement was able to diminish tension with France, thus to help in the
negotiations leading to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle with Spain in 1668
and to secure a temporary settlement of the Jansenist question (‘the peace
of the Church’ of 1669). But his attempts to induce Europe to assist
Venice against the Turks were completely unsuccessful, and this failure so
depressed him that he died soon after. French pressure, even more shame-
less in the next conclave, was responsible for the election of the fragile and
elderly Roman Altieri, who took the name of Clement X (1670-6).
Clement did his best to please the roi soleil and avoid further disputes;
but even his willing submissiveness could not shield him from painful
humiliations, in particular at the hands of the haughty French ambassador
d’Estrees who on more than one occasion publicly insulted the aged pope.
In the conclave after Clement X’s death the French emphasised that the
late pontiff had fallen into disgrace with Louis by insisting that no cardinal
who had been friendly with Clement should be elected. In the end the
choice of the Lombard Cardinal Odescalchi as Innocent XI (1676-89)
was permitted only because he was represented as an opponent of his
predecessor.
But Innocent XI differed from Clement X in his greater courage and
decisiveness in the defence of papal prerogatives. An austere pope of rigid
principles, Innocent undertook important work in the sphere of doctrine,
condemning moral casuistry and the obscure mysticism of the Quietists,
the disciples of the Spaniard Miguel de Molinos, who had acquired a
certain following in Italy. Even more notable was his struggle against
Gallicanism, despite its protection by Louis XIV, particularly in the Four
Articles controversy of 1 682. 1 Innocent also took up the old papal scheme
for a coalition against the Turks, and when Turkey attacked the Empire he
persuaded John Sobieski, king of Poland, to intervene as an ally of the
Habsburgs. 2 He celebrated Sobieski’s victory at Vienna by instituting the
new feast of the Name of Mary (1683). In 1684 he brought into being the
Holy League between Austria, Poland and Venice which is discussed
below. Meanwhile he also fought against nepotism, corruption and crime
in the Papal State and set about the restoration of its finances which had
suffered under the shocking administration of his predecessors. In his zeal
for reform he was even willing to face yet another dispute with a French
ambassador (Lavardin) over the latter’s intolerable abuse of diplomatic
1 See above, ch. vi, p. 137. 2 See below, ch. xxi, p. 514.
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immunity (1687), and he was not intimidated when Louis XIV again
threatened to send an army into Italy.
Thus ended a period of forty years during which French policy towards
the Holy See consisted exclusively of intimidation and the use of force.
This policy gravely damaged papal prestige in the eyes of the Italians and
did nothing whatever to link French power with the Catholic cause in the
way that the Habsburgs had linked Spain with the cause of the Counter-
Reformation. Despite his pose as the champion of Catholicism against
the Protestants, Louis XTV found himself without allies and threatened
with imminent war against the League of Augsburg. 1 French policy had
been merely negative; it had helped to discredit the old order of things
without contributing to the birth of a new one.
The merits of Innocent XI could not conceal the slow decay of Italian
Catholicism which had become mummified, as it were, in the attitudes
adopted during the Counter-Reformation and gave no indication of
realising a need for reform. Superficially, the Church had achieved com-
plete victory. No opposition to it survived in Italy except for some small
quietist conventicles, which were dogged by the Inquisition, and some
offshoots of French Jansenism. In reality, beneath the lazy, somnolent
conformism and superficial, festive religiosity of the Italians there was a
complete void, a void filled less by new ideas than by slothful scepticism
and often by an ignorant brand of anticlericalism. Characteristic of the
latter was Gregorio Leti (1630-1701), an adventurer who travelled
between Geneva, Paris, London and Amsterdam and for several decades
flooded Italy with innumerable scandalous pamphlets which, though
worthless, met with enormous success.
Italy’s political stagnation was in part the consequence of the appalling
condition to which she had been reduced by the Thirty Years War. In
1648 the peninsula was in a state of economic and intellectual decadence
and her population was declining. During the next forty years this deca-
dence was aggravated by Italy’s isolation from the main currents of
European history. It was a long time before the lowest point of decline
was reached and a certain stability achieved at a level much lower than
that which had prevailed earlier.
The population of Italy had suffered gravely from the terrible epidemics
of the war, from the devastations and from the resultant poverty. The
gaps were only slowly filled during the next forty years, for epidemics,
although less serious, continued until at least 1660, while other negative
factors, such as the disproportionate growth of a celibate clergy and the
general poverty and wretched living conditions of the lower classes, had
effects over a longer time. The long period of peace after 1659 did eventu-
ally bring some improvement, but the cities did not attain their former
1 See above, ch. ix, pp. 220-1 .
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levels of population. In the late sixteenth century Milan and Venice had
had about 250,000 and 200,000 inhabitants respectively. Both were
decimated by the epidemics of the early decades of the seventeenth
century, and although later both cities made a certain recovery, their popula-
tions did not rise above approximately 125,000 and 135,000. The loss was
all the more striking compared with the increase in the populations of
Paris and London during the same period.
The decline of the urban centres was part of a more general phenomenon.
In the early years of the seventeenth century Italy was still an active
country in commerce, industry and banking, which were centred mainly in
the towns. By the end of the century it was an almost exclusively agrarian
country, whose small and lethargic towns were for the most part admini-
strative centres or places of residence for the landowners. Italian finance
— except for that of Genoa — had vanished as an international economic
factor. Italian trade was mainly a memory of the past: Italians played no
part in the colonial trade which was the chief commercial activity of the
time, and their ports were in full decline. The loss of the Levant trade of
Venice has already been discussed, and Messina’s disappearance from the
list of great Mediterranean ports will be considered below. Even Genoa
was severely affected by the decline of the Spanish Empire of which it had
been one of the traditional economic centres. Leghorn remained active,
but mainly as an entrepot for foreign trade, particularly for the Dutch and
English. Industry also declined: the number of cloth factories in Milan
fell from seventy in the early years of the century to fifteen, while the
Florentine silk industry virtually disappeared. Factors in this appalling
decline were the collapse of the Spanish Empire, dragging three-quarters
of Italy after it, the competition of foreign powers, in particular of
England and Holland, and the aggressive mercantilism of France.
Louis XTV’s acts of violence against the Italian States were accompanied
by silent economic warfare, for example in the competition of Marseilles
with Genoa and the manufacture in France of the mirrors for which
Venice was famous. Here was another instance of Louis’s failure to
create organic links between France and Italy.
Agriculture was left as Italy’s main economic activity, but for the most
part it was of an unambitious, conservative nature, with only here and
there an occasional attempt at improvement; in Sicily, for instance, some
of the magnates built entire new villages to house the workers on their
estates. The growing rigidity of landed property also tended to dis-
courage technical improvements. More and more land passed into the
hands of the Church, while the noble estates were increasingly burdened
by trusts and entails. Finally, the increasing tendency on the part of the
merchant families to abandon their traditional activities and their gradual
transformation into a landed nobility led to the disappearance of the
habits of economic enterprise, industriousness and parsimony and their
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replacement by aristocratic habits of economic parasitism, idleness and
extravagant show. In the seventeenth century the Italian nobility regarded
the income from their lands as a means of enabling them to live without
working and to maintain a costly way of life; they were less likely to invest
in agricultural improvements than they were to spend their money in
building a luxurious villa. Social habits too reveal the importance of
landed property and the decline of the towns. People went to the country
for villeggiatura, to display their fashionable elegance: the ability or
inability to afford a villeggiatura was often regarded as the dividing line
between the upper and the lower ranks of society. The importance of land
had little to do with its economic exploitation.
Society itself was becoming more rigid in structure. Italy was turning
into a country of neglectful, affable gentlemen and resigned, fatalistic
peasants. Apart from the nobles and the clergy the only class of any
importance was a small professional group of teachers, lawyers and
officials. On the other hand, the long peace and the general tendency
towards deflation brought to an end the disorders caused by monetary
inflation and the worst forms of pauperism, crime and vagrancy which
had appeared in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Food
prices fell. Life was more stable; the people suffered from poverty and
exhaustion, but they managed to live, and in comparative tranquillity.
Towards the end of the century the peace began slowly to bear fruit.
Capital accumulated quietly in some parts, particularly in Lombardy
owing to the natural fertility of its soil and the decay of the Spanish
government, now too feeble to do much harm. In Tuscany a certain
administrative and intellectual tradition survived, and the descendants of
the Florentine merchants, transformed into a landed patriciate, were not
all negligible men. Naples had a class of lawyers who enjoyed social
prestige and occasionally showed considerable intellectual ability. Slowly
the ground was being prepared in which would germinate the enlighten-
ment of the following century. Yet although intellectuals, professional
men and officials might possess ability, they had no economic or political
power themselves and could only hope to exert influence in so far as the
machinery of the State allowed them. It is not surprising that they should
soon have begun to identify themselves with the cause of enlightened
despotism and to give it enthusiastic support.
Reforms and vigorous political action were still far in the future. Italy
was no longer capable of continuing in her high intellectual traditions
after the disappearance of the great generation of Galileo, Campanella,
Sarpi and Boccalini. Venice was still an important publishing centre, and
Italian universities could boast a few teachers of European fame, such as
Marcello Malpighi (1628-94) of Bologna, one of the founders of modem
biology. Galileo’s heritage lived on in Tuscany with the foundation of the
Accademia del Cimento (1657) and the excellent studies of its members —
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among them the Aretine doctor Francesco Redi (1626-97) — especially in
the field of biology. But the major currents of European thought and
learning were outside Italy. The lively scientific and philosophical inter-
ests of the Neapolitan class of wealthy lawyers and liberal-minded
noblemen showed themselves mainly in a concern with English, French
and Dutch culture. In contemporary opinion Italy was still the great
country for art and for refined pleasures. It was the country of the
Baroque masters, Bernini and Borromini, 1 and its painters and architects
swarmed across Europe, influencing profoundly the taste of their time.
It was the country of virtuoso singers and of delightful musicians, of Lully
and Scarlatti, of Baroque Rome, with its gorgeous ceremonies, its
churches and cardinals’ villas, of Venice, with its enchanted palaces along
the Grand Canal and its famous gaieties. It was no longer a country that
might be expected to provide literary, philosophical or political guidance.
A journey to Italy was still thought indispensable for the education of
young noblemen and artists, but the peninsula was becoming a country
for tourists, a museum.
The ruling houses and their courts putrefied in the futile routine of a
pointless existence, a decadence which was physiological as well as
political and moral. We have already observed the disappearance of the
class of Tuscan officials of the papacy which had once been so active, and
the fatal weakness of many of the popes of the second half of the seven-
teenth century. By the end of the century the families of Este, Gonzaga
and Famese, too, present a depressing spectacle of half-wits and
scoundrels. Ferdinand II de’ Medici, though weak and timid, had
achieved a certain reputation as a statesman owing to the skill with which
he piloted his own small State through the stormy waters of the Thirty
Years War. Buthisson CosimoHI(i670-i723) wasapatheticcaseof mental
disorder, whose subjects suffered through his morbid religious mania.
Few of the Italian States can be said to have had an internal policy. They
confined themselves to drawing some money from their subjects through
fiscal arrangements, which bore heavily on the poor by indirect taxes on
articles of general consumption, and hindered all forms of trade by multi-
tudes of duties and tolls. These revenues were then squandered on yet
another new palace or sumptuous Baroque church and on the mainten-
ance of a handful of courtiers and parasites, and that was all.
The sole exception was Piedmont, after the weak regency of Christina
had come to an end. The period of activity under Charles Emanuel II was
clearly the result of an intention to imitate Louis XTV: hence certain
reforms in legislation, finance and military affairs, combined with a rigid
absolutism aiming at the humiliation of the nobility, and an ambitious
mercantilist policy. But in practice these ambitions proved to be beyond
the country’s means — or beyond the duke’s real political capabilities.
1 See above, ch. vii, pp. 156-9.
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Charles Emanuel was filled with the desire to rank with crowned heads,
hence the dispatch of troops to distant Candia and his fantastic plans for
conquering Geneva and Genoa. The acquisition of Genoa was intended
as the culmination of Savoyard mercantilism, and the duke’s plan was to
take advantage of Louis XIV’s preparations for the Dutch War of 1672. 1
Counting on Spain being immobilised by this other commitment, Charles
Emanuel invaded Liguria in 1672; he also tried to organise a revolt in
Genoa itself through a Genoese adventurer, Raffaele della Torre. But
the plot was strangled at birth and the troops of Savoy suffered a humili-
ating defeat at the hands of the Genoese. Charles Emanuel II had to with-
draw as rapidly as possible from his ill-fated adventure, helped by the
mediation of Louis XIV. Mercantilist dreams failed to transform Pied-
mont’s economic structure which was agricultural and archaic. Despite
their temporary check, the noblemen remained the dominant class. The
unhappy duke died in 1675, and there followed a new regency, even more
feeble and inglorious than the last.
The disintegrating Spanish administration of Naples, Milan, Sardinia
and Sicily became, if possible, still more inefficient and corrupt. Spanish
rule survived less through its own strength than through French lack of
interest in Italy. Spanish officials still felt some interest in the peninsula
because it could provide a career and a salary for them, but this was not
true of France, intent upon other objectives. French interest was renewed
at the time of the Dutch War, but even then it took the form of sudden,
capricious interventions, not of a rational and organic policy.
Messina was the only place in Spanish Sicily to retain a considerable
degree of economic prosperity. Its port was still active, there was a lucra-
tive silk trade, and its ancient privileges made it a sort of independent
merchant republic. The Spanish government, however, was jealous of this
autonomy and encouraged the popular faction, the Merli, against the
dominant patrician party, the Malvizzi. In 1674 the Malvizzi replied by
organising a Messinese revolt. The Spanish troops were driven out, and
the Malvizzi offered the city to Louis XIV, who not only accepted it but
sent troops to assist in its defence. The French fleet won a victory over the
Spaniards off the Lipari Islands (1675) and another over de Ruyter’s
Dutchmen off Augusta (1676). It looked as though the French would soon
conquer the whole of Sicily. But England saw this situation as a threat to
her interests in the Mediterranean, and Louis did not hesitate to sacrifice
the Messinese rather than arouse English hostility: in 1678 he withdrew
his troops. Thousands of Messina’s citizens took to flight, in grim condi-
tions which Louis did nothing to relieve. Depopulated, punished by
bloody Spanish reprisals, and deprived of its privileges, Messina lost all
its former prosperity.
1 See above, ch. ix, p. 215.
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Instead of supporting those who had trusted him , the roi soleil now
renewed the French claim to Casale, taking advantage of the financial
difficulties to which Ferdinand Charles, duke of Mantua (1669-1707), had
been reduced by his dissipations. In 1678 the duke promised to cede
Casale for a money payment by an agreement which was kept secret to
avoid possible action by other powers. The secret was betrayed by one of
the duke’s ministers, Count Mattioli — again for money. Louis XTV then
succeeded in capturing Mattioli by a trick and in imprisoning him: he
was probably the famous ‘man in the iron mask’. Louis renewed his
negotiations with the duke and finally secured Casale in 1681.
Encouraged by this success, Louis attempted next to gain Genoa, where
he built up a pro-French ‘fifth column* and tried to provoke incidents
to justify armed intervention. When war again broke out between France
and Spain in 1683 Louis ordered the Genoese to discontinue their tradi-
tional assistance to Spain and made other far-reaching demands. The
republic did not yield, however, even when a French fleet appeared before
Genoa — without any declaration of war — and subjected the city to a fierce
bombardment lasting five days (17-22 May 1684). Louis’s aggression and
Genoa’s costly resistance had a considerable effect on Italian opinion,
arousing indignation against his bullying attitude. Yet the Spanish weak-
ness enabled him to disguise the substantial failure of his scheme of
conquest under the dramatic appearance of success. By the truce of
Ratisbon (1684) Louis promised to respect Genoa’s independence, but
was left free to exact a sop to his pride. In May 1685 the doge of Genoa
had to travel to Versailles to perform a solemn act of humiliation and beg
the king’s forgiveness for having incurred his anger.
By that time the international situation was again altering. Innocent XI’s
crusading policy had achieved its first successes with Sobieski’s victory at
Vienna (1683) and the constitution of the Holy League — the Empire,
Poland and Venice — against the Turks (1684). To strengthen the Empire
against the Turks meant also, implicitly, to strengthen the Habsburgs
against the Bourbons. Soon the league was gaining brilliant successes.
Fifteen years after his evacuation of Candia Francesco Morosini was
again appointed captain-general; his fleet, reinforced by Tuscan, Maltese
and papal ships, attacked Santa Maura (an island in the Ionian Sea) and
the fortress of Prevesa. The inhabitants of Albania and the Epirus, and
the Morlacchi of Dalmatia rose in rebellion against the Turks, and in 1685
Morosini’s fleet began the attack on Greece by taking Koroni. The con-
quest of the Morea was completed in 1687, and Morosini was acclaimed
as Peloponnesiacus. Before the end of that year the Gulf of Corinth had
been crossed and Athens itself was in the hands of the Venetians. Thus
1688 began under the best of auspices for the arms of Venice and her allies
of the Holy League.
Events now maturing in northern Italy threatened Louis XTV more
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directly. Louis had long been able to dominate Savoy, particularly after
the death of Charles Emanuel II (1675), when the French princess Jeanne-
Baptiste of Savoy-Nemours acted as regent for her young son Victor
Amadeus II (1675-1730). She attempted to retain control after her son
had reached his majority, keeping him away from power and relying on
the support of the French king. Victor Amadeus, precociously expert at
dissimulation, kept secret his feelings against his mother and the French:
he had real political talent as a ‘ Machiavellian ’ prince, a talent which was
maturing during this silent, lonely phase of his life. His State, however,
was still declining rapidly, both in external and internal affairs. In 1680-2
Mondovi and the surrounding countryside was the scene of the bloody
‘ salt war’, a revolt against court taxation which was suppressed only after
much fighting and harsh military repression. In 1687 Jeanne-Baptiste
renewed on behalf of herself and her son the terms of subjection to France
stipulated in the Treaty of Cherasco: Victor Amadeus was to marry a
French wife, chosen for him by Louis XIV, in 1684. The young duke used
this marriage as the occasion for a coup d'etat, depriving his mother of
power and himself taking over the government of his State, but Louis
repaid this energetic action by many humiliating vexations.
After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) 1 Louis forced Victor
Amadeus to persecute his Protestant subjects, the Waldensians. Faced
with the choice of immediate conversion to Catholicism or expulsion from
Piedmont, the Waldensians organised resistance, led by one of then-
pastors, Enrico Amaud. Louis thereupon sent an army under Catinat to
Piedmont under the pretext of assisting the duke against the rebels.
Waldensian resistance was overcome by methods of hideous cruelty, and
the entire population of the valleys, including women and children, was
rounded up and imprisoned in various Piedmontese fortresses ; two-thirds
of the twelve thousand people involved died as a result of hardship and
disease (1686). But a handful of guerrillas continued to hold out in the
Alps, until at last the duke decided to release the surviving prisoners and
to send them to Geneva where they were generously succoured by fellow-
Protestants.
By this time the League of Augsburg and the great European alliance,
which was to wage a general war against Louis XTV after the landing of
William of Orange in England, was already in process of formation. With
extreme caution, lest his action should become known and provoke Louis
to revenge, Victor Amadeus began to contact secretly the enemies of
France. At once the perennial Waldensian question was raised, this time
by Amaud, who began to organise the ‘Glorious Return’ of his people
with the aid of William III under whose flag they now fought. In August
1689 their force started from Lake Geneva under Amaud’s command; an
extraordinarily daring march took them over the Alps and into their own
1 See above, ch. vi, p. 141.
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valleys, where they resumed their guerrilla campaigns. These were marked
by episodes which seem to come straight from adventure stories, such as
the defence of Monte Balziglia by the Waldensians against a besieging
army of 11,000 Frenchmen. In June 1690, when Arnaud’s men were
decimated by the fighting and their cause apparently lost, they were
visited by a ducal emissary who offered them peace on condition that they
joined the forces of Savoy against the king of France.
On his usual pretext of fighting the Waldensians Louis XTV had again
dispatched Catinat with an army into Piedmont. In reality he now sus-
pected that the duke had come to an agreement with his enemies. Catinat
made ever more onerous demands, culminating in an order that Savoy
should give up its principal fortresses and send its army to France as a
guarantee of good faith. Victor Amadeus won time by pretending to
negotiate with Catinat while covertly negotiating with Spain and the
Empire. A secret agreement was signed whereby Savoy joined the League
of Augsburg in return for a promise of immediate military assistance
against France and the restoration of Pinerolo at the end of the war
(3 June 1690). A few days later Catinat demanded the handing-over of the
citadel of Turin without further delay and Victor Amadeus replied by
openly starting hostilities. Thus began a new phase in European and in
Italian history.
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CHAPTER XX
THE HABSBURG LANDS
D uring the two years that followed his election as Emperor in 1519
Charles V handed over to his brother Ferdinand all the hereditary
Habsburg lands in central Europe. By securing his own election to
the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary in 1526 Ferdinand I completed the
Habsburg Empire. His was the cadet branch of his House and his domin-
ions were remote from the Atlantic seaboard, economically backward,
riven by social and domestic strife, devastated and crippled by the Turks.
During the Thirty Years War, except for Wallenstein’s brief heyday,
Austria played only a secondary part and emerged from that war maimed,
depopulated and impoverished. But by the end of the century the Habs-
burg monarchy became one of the great powers, hailed as the saviour of
Christendom in the last and only permanently successful crusade, wooed
as an ally by the maritime powers, feared as a rival by France. It is true
that the Habsburgs climbed to this position of power by destroying the
Bohemian nation and abrogating the liberties of Hungary, but the means
and the persons engaged in this achievement make the history of the
Habsburg lands in the second half of the seventeenth century an important
and illuminating chapter in the history of European society.
Few dynasties have bred more truly to type than the Habsburgs. The
three rulers whose reigns, uninterrupted by dynastic disputes or debili-
tating minorities, extended from 1619 to 1705 all exhibited the virtues and
weaknesses typical of their line; they were conscientious, convinced of the
dignity, rights and responsibilities of the office to which they devoutly
believed themselves to be divinely appointed; they were sincere Christians
and devoted Catholics; their private morals were impeccable. Leopold I,
whose long reign occupied most of this half-century, was, like his ancestors
and successors down to Joseph II, a collector of books and pictures, an
amateur of music and a devotee of the chase. Though his chosen policy
compelled him to tax his subjects into poverty and to recruit them in
hundreds of thousands for his wars, he was not devoid of Christian and
human sympathy for their sufferings on the rare occasions they were
brought to his notice. When in 1680 the peasants of Bohemia were able
to present their petitions direct to him he wrote to Count Humprecht
tern in : ‘In these evil times it is indeed necessary to do something for the
peasants and to deal with them kindly, since after all they are men like
us.’ 1 Their fervent belief in the divine origin of their royal office made
1 Quoted in Ceskosbvenskd Vlastiveda, vol. rv, ‘DSjiny’, ed. V. Novotny (Prague, 1930),
P- 531-
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both Ferdinand III and Leopold I look enviously at the unlimited auto-
cracy of some of their contemporary sovereigns. On the death of his tutor
and chief minister, Prince Giovanni Porzia, in 1665, Leopold declared his
resolve ‘to be himself his own prime minister’. 1 But Leopold was not of
the stuff of the Great Elector or Peter the Great. He suffered from an
agonising inability to make up his mind, so much so that the papal nuncio
Albizzi was driven to say: ‘If I were permitted to say so, I would per-
sonally wish that the Emperor’s trust in God were a bit less, so that he
might deal with somewhat more foresight with the dangers which threaten,
and when he has decided, act. ’ 2
In dealing with the history of the Habsburg lands it is essential never to
forget that the Austrian Habsburgs were the wearers of the crown of the
Holy Roman Empire continuously from 1556 to 1740. They themselves
never forgot it. It enhanced their sense of vocation and convinced them
that as the secular heads of the whole Christian society they were especi-
ally responsible for restoring both the confessional and the territorial
integrity of Christendom. Leopold especially was very conscious of the
rights and duties that his Imperial position entailed. He jealously regarded
every acre of the Empire and, after the dismissal of his Gallophile
minister Lobkowitz in 1674, he did not hesitate to engage the lives and
wealth of his Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian subjects in three long
wars with France for the defence of Germany. On the other hand, he
firmly believed that as Emperor and German king he had the right to call
on the Imperial Diet to vote him men and money for his wars as well
against the sultan as against the king of France; the Diet, as far as its now
diminished competence and resources permitted, usually complied. It is
true that the Emperor could no longer summon the German princes to do
him military service; but nevertheless the sense of common danger, the
skill of Francois Paul de Lisola’s ubiquitous diplomacy and the still sur-
viving sense of their duty to the Christian Empire combined to bring most
of the great princes of Germany into active alliance with the Emperor in
his French and Turkish wars. Four princes of the Empire, Charles duke
of Lorraine, Max Emanuel elector of Bavaria, Louis margrave of Baden
and Frederick Augustus elector of Saxony, commanded the armies which
expelled the Turks from Hungary, the first three with distinction and
success.
When the Peace of Westphalia was concluded in October 1648 Ferdi-
nand HI was forty years of age. The worry of war, the cares of government
and the gout made him already think of himself as an old man with not
long to live. Much of his concern during his remaining nine years was to
secure the Imperial succession for one or the other of his sons in his own
1 ‘Sein eigener Primado selbst zu sein’: Privatbriefe, 1, 105, of 18 February 1665, quoted
by O. Redlich, Geschichte Osterreichs (Gotha, 1921), vi, 112.
* Quoted by Redlich, ibid.
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lifetime. 1 The Thirty Years War left Ferdinand with diminished territories,
for his father had sacrificed Lusatia to purchase the defection of Saxony
from the Protestant coalition in 1635. Even so Ferdinand’s do min ions
were numerous and extensive. As direct descendant of Rudolph I he was
duke of Upper and Lower Austria, margrave of Styria, duke of Carinthia
and Camiola and hereditary lord of scattered lands in Swabia. His
cousin, the archduke Ferdinand Charles, was Landesfurst of the county
of Tyrol, the last of the Habsburg apanages, which was to escheat to the
Crown with the death of the last of the Tyrolean branch, the archduke
Sigismund Francis, in 1665. This completed the reunion of all the Habs-
burg territories in the hands of the head of the family and so the conditions
for the completion of the experiment in centralisation were fulfilled.
Ferdinand III and Leopold I were also kings of Bohemia and therefore
rulers of all the lands of the Crown of St Wenceslas: the kingdom of
Bohemia, the margraviate of Moravia and the many and tiny dukedoms
which constituted the political patchwork of Upper and Lower Silesia.
By the Renewed Land Ordinance of 1627, which had given legal definition
to the subjection of the kingdom after the defeat of the Bohemian
rebellion at the White Mountain in 1620, the Crown of St Wenceslas was
made hereditary in the House of Habsburg. The complete defeat of the
Bohemian rebellion provided the Habsburg kings of the seventeenth
century with an ideal field for a preliminary exercise in centralised auto-
cracy. It was carried out by implicit agreement between the Habsburg
king and the Bohemian nobility, many of whom were the mercenary
officers who had fought for Austria in the Thirty Years War; they had
been belatedly but lavishly paid by the grant to them of the estates of
Czech landlords who had suffered death or exile as traitors or heretics.
The Bohemian Estates continued to meet, but only at and for the king’s
convenience. To the traditional Chambers of magnates, gentry and towns
was now added a First Chamber of prelates. But the Estates had been
deprived of most of their initiative; they appointed only powerless digni-
taries and minor officials; they might question the budgetary proposals
presented to them by the Hofkammer in Vienna, though rarely did any
of the Chambers do so except the prelates, and never effectively. The
Bohemian Estates in this period were chiefly concerned with making law-
ful the exploitation of the serfs and legalising the economic privileges of
the landlords at the expense of the towns. Since 1627 the last remnants of
the autonomy of the towns had disappeared; their magistrates were
appointed by the Crown or the lord, their landed property, which had been
extensive, was forfeited, and the privileged competition of the lords’
breweries, inns, shops and manufactories almost ruined the economy of
the towns. From 1632 the margraviate of Moravia had been governed,
with no pretence of maintaining the rights of its Estates, by a nominated
1 See below, p. 486. -
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tribunal which sat in Brno. As Silesia had taken no part in the rebellion of
1618 it was allowed to retain its two diets and no formal constitutional
change was imposed. The' administration of Bohemia itself was carried on
from Vienna by the Bohemian Chancery, composed of a High Chancellor
and Councillors, some of them Bohemian aristocrats, some Austrians or
Germans, but all nominated by the Crown.
The uneasy head of Ferdinand III was also dignified and encumbered
by the royal and apostolic Crown of St Stephen, the battered crown which
the Habsburgs had fished out of the swamps of Mohacs in 1526. In virtue
of it Ferdinand was nominally king of Hungary and Transylvania,
Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia. In fact, of the great Hungarian kingdom
which Suleiman I had shattered, only little more than a quarter, merely
the western and northern counties, was under Ferdinand’s rule. About
five-twelfths were ruled by the prince of Transylvania, often under the
suzerainty of the sultan, but always, until 1687, outside Habsburg control.
The remaining third of Hungary, a wedge of territory with its broad base
on the Sava and Danube and its blunt apex in southern Slovakia, was
directly ruled by the Turks, constituting the vilayets of Kanizsa, Buda and
Temesvar, each under a resident military governor or pasha. Though both
the Hungarian capital cities, Buda and Szekesfehervar, and the seat of the
primate, the archbishop of Esztergom (Gran), were in Turkish hands, the
Turks had acquired only the poorest and most sparsely populated part of
the country. The mineral wealth of Slovakia was in royal Hungary and
that of the Siebenbiirgen in Transylvania. In 1648 royal Hungary still
enjoyed the national autonomy it had exacted from the quarrelling
Habsburgs in 1606 and 1608. It had a parliament of two tabulae, one
composed of the great officers of State, the magnates and the prelates, the
other of representatives chosen by the gentry of the counties, and the
Hungarian Estates had much more real power than their enfeebled
counterparts in Bohemia and Austria. It elected the Palatine ( Nador ),
who commanded the national armed forces, and legislated profusely on
social, economic, legal and religious matters. It is true that the Hungarian
Chancery sat in Vienna, but the Hungarian Chamber (the treasury) was in
Pressburg and the independence of both was jealously guarded by the
Hungarians. The only Imperial organs of State which exerted any
authority in Hungary were the Court War Council ( Hofkriegsrat ) and the
Court Chamber ( Hofkammer ) which had certain powers, such as the
administration of the mines of Slovakia.
Ferdinand’s kingdom of Croatia was treated as what it was, an outpost
against the Turks and the last foothold of a Christian prince in the
Balkans. The eastern part of the kingdom was in Turkish hands and
formed part of the vilayet of Sirmium. The western half of Croatia and
the northern part of Dalmatia constituted a precariously exiguous strip of
Christian territory running down to the Adriatic. The Estates of Croatia
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still met in Zagreb, but the government of the country was a military one,
conducted by the royally appointed Ban, in 1648 the great Hungarian
soldier-poet Miklos Zrinyi.
Transylvania had been independent of Austria since Ferdinand I had
divided the kingdom of Hungary with King John Zapolyai in 1538. Amid
the storms of the first half of the seventeenth century the Transylvanian
princes, Gabor Bethlen and Gyorgy Rakoczi I, had preserved and
strengthened the principality. Gyorgy Rakoczi died in 1648. His son of
the same name had already been elected prince by the Transylvanian
Estates in 1642. Gyorgy Rakoczi H was twenty-seven years old when he
began to reign in 1648. He inherited vast estates in Transylvania and in
north-east Hungary both from his father and his mother, Zsofia Bathory,
as well as the domains that went with the princely office. He was a spoilt,
vain and rash young man, ambitious to become king of either Hungary or
Poland. Beside Transylvania he ruled the large adjoining counties of
Szatmar and Szabolcs. The principality was still formally a federation of
three ‘nations’: the Magyars, the Magyar-speaking Szeklers of its eastern
part, and the ‘ Saxons the townsfolk of German origin and speech.
The material state of the Habsburg lands after the Thirty Years War
was bad. Vast sacrifices of men, money and requisitioned goods had been
made by every part of the monarchy where the Emperor’s writ still ran,
though not all parts had been within the field of military operations. It
was Austria north of the Danube and particularly Bohemia and Moravia
which had suffered from the presence and the conflict of the rival armies.
The war had begun with the defenestration of Prague in 1618 and it had
ended with the battle of the Charles Bridge in Prague in 1648. In the
intervening years half a dozen bloody and destructive campaigns had
been fought on Czech soil, for the most part between the Imperialists and
the Swedes. Wallenstein’s armies had battened on the country; the
Swedish occupiers were even more exacting and destructive. The Swedes
were still in Bohemia in 1648, and it was another two years before the
Treaty of Nuremberg and the payment of five million guilders induced them
to go home. Even then they took with them as booty the great art collec-
tion which Rudolph II had made in Prague as well as many manuscripts
of Wyclif and Hus.
The effect of the war which was of the greatest consequence was
depopulation. The destruction of life directly due to the war, the mortality
of soldiers in battle and in camp, the starvation and death from cold due
to the requisitions and depredations of the armies which had been for
twenty years quartered in the country, the plague which persisted into the
years of peace, the drop in the natural state of reproduction due to the
absence of so many men on military service for so long, all had conspired
to reduce the population by hundreds of thousands. To these losses
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directly due to the war must be added those due to enforced or voluntary
emigration. After the victory of Crown and Catholic Church in Austria as
well as in the Czech lands Protestants were compelled to conform or to
depart. Concrete evidence of the extent of destruction and depopulation
in Bohemia is afforded by the great tax roll (berni rula) which itinerant
committees of the Estates compiled for most of the country in 1654 and
1655. In form, content and purpose it is much like Domesday Book,
listing the tenants of holdings and their land and stock. Though only
about half of the berni rula has been published it suffices to confirm what
other evidence suggests, that the destruction of life and property since
1618 had been enormous, though perhaps not as great as has sometimes
been said. Czech historians today estimate that the population of
Bohemia declined from some 1,700,000 in 1618 to something more than
900,000 after 1648. The decline in Moravia was in similar proportion.
The Austrian lands also lost many exiles for religion’s sake after the
repression of the rising of 1626 and 1627. A patent of Ferdinand II of the
latter year ordered the knights and nobles of Upper Austria to conform or
to depart, and in 1628 much the same treatment was meted out to Lower
Austria. In 1645 the Swedish army had gone plundering and burning
through the Austrian arable lands north of the Danube. Hungary’s
population probably declined less than that of the western part of the
monarchy. Nevertheless its losses had been and continued to be con-
siderable. In Turkish Hungary the Christian population was decimated by
the sheer poverty and starvation due to a sandy or marshy soil, backward
husbandry and the demands of the landlord, the tax-collector and the
sultan’s recruiting officers, as well as by the flight of many of the better off
to northern and western Hungary. 1 Hungary as a whole had not been
invaded and devastated by the armies of the Thirty Years War. Officially
there had been peace between the Emperor and the sultan since the Treaty
of Zsitvatorok of 1606. But neither the Christian nor the Muslim
emperor was able to control the commanders on his distant frontiers.
Throughout the fifty years of nominal peace there were constant raids by
ambitious and avaricious pashas into Christian territory in which peasants
and townspeople were murdered, robbed or carried away into slavery.
Preventive or retaliatory incursions across the undefined border by the
commanders of the Hungarian frontier fortresses often were less harmful
to the Turks than to their Christian subjects. Hungary also suffered from
the plague which was pandemic in the second half of the seventeenth
century.
In all those parts of the Habsburg lands where tillage or forestry was
the predominant economy the shortage of labour which resulted from this
1 The researches of Professor H. Inaliik have recently shown that the Turkish fiscal
system was not as harsh to the Christians of the Balkans as has hitherto been assumed.
Whether this is also true of Turkish Hungary awaits investigation.
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depopulation was crucial because it coincided with an increasing demand
for rural labour. Throughout central Europe landlords were discovering
that if they used their land not merely to feed and clothe their own house-
holds but also as a source of production of commodities which could be
sold, they would gain a money income which would satisfy growing
appetites and wider ambitions. Markets for agricultural and forest pro-
ducts were growing: the western European States, increasingly engaged in
commerce and manufacture, were demanding corn and timber; Vienna,
Prague and the south-German towns needed to be fed and clothed; the
huge standing armies maintained by the Emperor and the sultan and the
many permanent garrisons on the Turkish frontier afforded a considerable
market, as did the courts of princes, magnates and prelates. All these
markets the landlords were monopolising. This exploitation of the land
for sale and profit went further in Poland , 1 but it was important in
Bohemia, Hungary and Austria also. The landowners produced and sold
corn, timber, pigs, poultry, wine, beer and spirits. By using their pre-
dominance in the various Estates they were able to grant themselves
monopolies and trading privileges. They built frontier granaries and com
barges. They rafted timber down the Hron and the Vah to the Danube.
The Bohemian lords built many large and highly profitable fish-ponds.
This transition from an economy of manorial self-sufficiency to one of
production for the market involved a fundamental agrarian revolution.
The landlord was no longer content to allow his peasant tenants to occupy
nearly all his estate with their holdings. He needed not their customary
and often paltry rents but their labour. He therefore took every opportu-
nity to increase his demesne, the land which he did not let out but which
he kept in his own hands to produce marketable crops. The demesne was
increased by strictly interpreting the law and custom which regulated the
escheat of peasant holdings for defect of direct male heirs. Peasants’
holdings left vacant through war or pestilence were also brought into the
demesne.
Demesne farming, if it was to be profitable, needed abundant cheap
labour. The fall in the value of money made it uneconomical for the land-
lord to hire labour for wages. His only recourse was to force the peasants
to labour on the demesne land without pay, and because there were now
fewer labourers the predial service demanded from each peasant holding
had to be increased; hence arose the enormous growth in the labour
services demanded from the peasants of central and eastern Europe which
characterised this period. For Bohemia we have the evidence not only of
the legislation of the Estates, but also of contemporaries such as J. E.
Wegener and the Dutch Jesuit Jacob des Haies, that serf labour ( robota )
on the lords’ demesnes, rent, taxes and tithes consumed three-fifths of the
serfs’ labour; more than a quarter of them worked every day except
1 See below, ch. xxrv, p. 565.
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Sundays and saints’ days for their lords. Whereas before 1620 the peasant
tenant had usually done only some four to twelve days’ boon work a year
for his lord, after 1627 week work, at first exceptional but later usual, was
enforced and the norm came to be three days a week of predial work from
each peasant holding. Those who had larger holdings were bound to do
‘draught robota', that is, to provide beside their labour two horses and a
cart or heavy plough. The landlords usually had no draft animals of their
own and owned beasts for fattening only; all the carting of the goods to
market or river port was done by unpaid peasant labour. The peasants
were compelled to buy their com, wine, beer and spirits, often also their
cheese, fish, cattle, poultry and salt, solely from their own lords. Payments
for the use of the lord’s mill and for licences to leave his estate were heavy.
In royal Hungary there was a parallel worsening of the conditions of the
serfs, Magyar, Slovak and Croat alike.
The economic and political predominance of the landowners was also a
potent factor in the calamitous decline of the towns in the Habsburg lands.
The implication of the towns in the Bohemian and Austrian rebellions of
1618 to 1626 had provided the opportunity for the restriction of their civic
liberties and the undermining of their manufactures and trade. They were
forbidden to sell to the peasants goods of the kind produced on the lords’
estates. Plans for the development of industry and commerce propounded
by publicists such as Wegener, the enlightened and patriotic Czech Jesuit
Bohuslav Balbin, P. H. Morgenthaler and F. S. Malirsky were ignored.
The royal towns were oppressed by debts and taxes, neglected by the
Chamber, and therefore made little if any progress. The ‘subject’ towns,
that is, those which were part of the property of some lord or prelate and
which together had more than twice the population of the royal towns,
recovered somewhat more rapidly, for it was to the lords’ interests that
they should do so. Nevertheless when industry began to recover after
1650 in the Czech and Slovak lands, it did so rather in the countryside
than in the towns.
The lingering consequences of the Thirty Years War, the continual
hostilities on the Turkish frontier, unofficial at first, but from 1661 to
1699 open, general and almost uninterrupted, the drain of men and
money for the standing army, the garrisons and Leopold’s long wars with
France, and the degradation of town life, all combined to arrest the
cultural development of the Habsburg lands. Writing in German or Czech
contributed little to poetry and nothing to drama. Only the Latin plays
produced in some of the Jesuit colleges and schools, the Latin writings of
Balbin, some treatises in German and Italian on politics or the art of war,
and, exceptionally, the Magyar poetry of Miklos Zrinyi, afford any
presage of the flowering of the following century. In painting, sculpture,
architecture and music Leopold and the aristocrats of his dominions were
just beginning to import the Italian, German, Polish and French artists
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THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE
who laid the foundations of the Baroque of Prague, Vienna and the Slovak
towns. It was the fault and the loss of the Habsburg kings of Bohemia
that the two best Czech painters of the seventeenth century, Karel Skreta
and Wenceslas Hollar, did most of their best work in exile in Germany,
Holland or England. That was also the fate of an even more eminent man,
Jan Amos Komensky, known to the world as Comenius, the last bishop of
the Bohemian Brethren, whose pioneer works on education were written
during his restless wanderings from Leszno in Poland, to London, Stock-
holm, Elbing in Prussia, Sarospatak in Hungary, to Amsterdam where he
died in 1670. After the expulsion or conversion of the Austrian and Czech
Protestants higher education remained in the hands of the Jesuits, whose
achievements were not entirely destructive. Whereas one Jesuit, Antonin
KoniaS, boasted of having burned 60,000 Czech books, his younger col-
league, Balbin, was the only man within the kingdom who showed any
interest in the history or language of the Czechs. His Dissertatio apolo-
getica pro lingua slavonica praecipue bohemica was brave and eloquent,
but no one dared publish it until 1775, more than a century after it was
written. In northern Hungary Jesuit teachers wrote on biblical, historical
and contemporary themes, occasionally in the Slovak language.
By 1648 the first stage of the Counter-Reformation had been almost
completed in the Austrian and Czech lands; that is to say the open
practice and preaching of Protestantism had been stopped by the expul-
sion of ministers and school-teachers, by the execution or proscription of
all gentry and burgesses who had been treasonably or heretically active,
by the resumption or demolition of the property of the Protestant com-
munities, and by compelling the mass of the Protestants to conform to the
Catholic Church on pain of forfeiture and exile. The task was the easier
because Czech and Austrian Protestantism had been primarily a land-
lord’s interest; as patron of the parish church the landlord had determined
the confessional allegiance of the incumbents he appointed and therefore
also the type of service and the spiritual allegiance of the parishioners.
Once the Protestant landlord had been replaced by a Catholic or had him-
self become a Catholic and had installed a Catholic priest who conducted
a Catholic service, it was the easiest and usual thing for the parishioners to
accept the new state of affairs. Recatholicisation was easier in Austria,
for there Protestantism was more recent and less widespread than in
Bohemia. Only in Lower Austria were landowners allowed to hold
Protestant services in their own houses, but they could not admit their
neighbours or even their tenants. By the middle of the century only
forty-two lords and thirty-two knights exercised this privilege.
In Bohemia and Moravia the task of recatholicisation was bigger and
more difficult. It was not only that the majority of Czechs had been
heretics and schismatics since the early fifteenth century, but also that the
Catholic Church had been so diminis hed and impoverished in property
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THE H ABSBURG LANDS
and in talent that it had to be rebuilt almost from the foundations.
Bohemia was the only predominantly Protestant State which was ever
brought back wholly into the Catholic fold. Ferdinand HI was devoutly
convinced of his duty towards his erring subjects. He was the patron of
the Marian cult, the promotion of which in all his dominions was one of
the most effective instruments of the Counter-Reformation. A ‘Marian
pillar’ still dominates the central square in many a Czech, Slovak and
Austrian town or village. Professors in the University of Prague, no
longer Carolina but Ferdinandea, had annually to swear their belief in the
Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. The final campaign in the crusade
against the Hussites was inaugurated by two decrees of the regents of
Bohemia published in September 1639 and February 1650, pronouncing
that all must conform within three weeks. There was some rioting and so
many flights from the country that the landlords, troubled as ever by the
shortage of labour, got some relaxation of the peremptoriness of the
decree. The archbishop of Prague, Cardinal Adalbert Harrach, and some
of the more prudent Jesuits restrained the haste of the zealots and stopped
some of the beating and imprisonment of recalcitrants. Harrach saw the
need for a more positive policy and therefore set on foot the reorganisation
and expansion of the ecclesiastical structure. A third and a fourth
Bohemian bishopric were created, at Litomence in 1655 and at Hradec
Kralove in 1664.
It was more difficult to persuade the lords. Catholic though they now
were, to disgorge the property which their Protestant predecessors had
confiscated from the Church and to provide enough good Catholic priests,
for many landlords were still reluctant to let the sons of their serfs go into
the Church. In Bohemia, as in Hungary, the parishes had often to be
manned by regulars. In 1651 Ferdinand set up in Austria and Bohemia
‘Reformation commissions’, composed in each district of a lay royal
nominee and a cleric, usually a local abbot or prior, who chose local
clergy to carry out ‘instruction’. Registers were compiled of non-
Catholics, who were summoned to undergo six weeks of instruction and
then given the choice of conformity or exile. It usually depended on the
local lord whether this sanction was enforced. Many recalcitrants were
ingenious in evading obedience to such a summons and often the lords
helped them to do so. Nevertheless the steady labours of the Jesuits were
undoubtedly successful with the mass of the people, deprived as they were
of spiritual and temporal leadership. By 1664 the Czech lands, with the
exception of a few mining villages in the Ore Mountains, had at least out-
wardly conformed. Secret Protestant services, hymn-singing, prayer
meetings and Bible readings continued, particularly in the northern and
north-eastern parts of the country where clandestine visits from exiled
pastors and the smuggling in of forbidden books from Saxony and Silesia
were possible. This underground Protestantism, not very widespread,
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survived to re-emerge when Joseph n issued his patent of toleration in
1781. In Silesia alone of the lands of the Bohemian Crown was Pro-
testantism officially tolerated, for the Elector of Saxony had insisted that
by the terms of the Peace of Westphalia Lutheranism should be allowed
in the Silesian principalities of Ols, Brieg, Liegnitz and Wohlau and in the
towns of Breslau, Schweidnitz, Jauer and Glogau. The bishop of Breslau,
Ferdinand’s brother Leopold William, had little time to foster the
Counter-Reformation in Silesia, for he was also bishop of Olomouc and
governor of the Spanish Netherlands.
The great effort to recatholicise Hungary and Slovakia had been made
before 1648 by Cardinal Peter Pazmany, archbishop of Esztergom. With
the zealous help of the Jesuits and the Franciscans he had won over many
of the nobles of western and north-western Hungary to the Catholic
Church, and they had normally brought their tenants and serfs with them.
But the military and political successes of the Calvinist princes of Tran-
sylvania, Gabor Bethlen and Gyorgy Rakoczi I had arrested the process.
By the Treaty of Linz of 1645 between Ferdinand and Rakoczi royal
Hungary was confirmed in the enjoyment of the measure of toleration
which had been conceded by Matthias II at his coronation in 1608: free-
dom of confession to all of noble birth and to the royal towns. This
toleration was extended at Linz to the inhabitants of all towns and, in
theory, even to the subject tenants of lords whose faith was different from
theirs. In Turkish Hungary the Christian sects languished under the
toleration of Muslim indifference. Here the Catholics were in the worst
state, for the prelates whose sees were in Turkish territory had long before
departed, the archbishop of Esztergom to Tmava, the bishops of Eger,
Pecs, Nagyvarad (Grosswardein), Gyulafehervar (Karlsburg) and Vesz-
prem to some western asylum, but itinerant Franciscan and other mis-
sionaries kept the Catholic Church alive during the hundred and fifty
years of Turkish occupation. The Calvinists managed to maintain some
local organisation under the Turks and were helped by the continuance of
relations with their fellow-believers in Transylvania. Transylvania itself
throughout the seventeenth century preserved its peculiarity of virtually
complete religious toleration. Its princes were Calvinists, and Calvinism
was the faith of most of the Magyar lords and gentry, and therefore in
practice, though not in law, of their serfs. The strength of Lutheranism lay
in the ‘Saxons’, the German inhabitants of the Transylvanian towns.
A diminished minority remained faithful to the Socinian anti-Trinitari-
anism which had flourished in Transylvania in the last decades of the
sixteenth century and managed with some difficulty to avoid complete
absorption in either the Reformed or the Catholic Church. The position
of the surviving Roman Catholics was almost as precarious, but despite
the flight or expulsion of the Roman prelates and the opposition of the
Estates and princes to Jesuit intrusion, the Catholic community in
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Transylvania survived until it was reinvigorated by the return of the
principality to its allegiance to Leopold I at the end of the century. The
growing number of Rumanian-speaking Transylvanians was permitted its
Greek Orthodox churches, hierarchy and liturgy. All this variety of
religious practice in Transylvania was rather the result and symbol of the
weakness of the State than an expression of any precocious attachment to
the theory of toleration which John Locke was only then beginning to
formulate.
With the territories, peoples and problems described in the foregoing
pages, Ferdinand III and Leopold I tried to deal in informal alliance with
the greater landowners and the prelates, who, with their officials and the
county and manorial courts, played the part of a civil service in local
administration and jurisdiction. The central government of the monarchy
the Emperor carried out with the help of the existing advisory and admini-
strative bodies. Policy was made by him in consultation with his privy
council ( Geheimer Rat), composed of the president (Hofhochme inter, who
came nearer to being prime minister than anyone else), the High Marshal
of the Court, the Court Vice-Chancellor and two or three other councillors
( Vertrauensmanner ). The privy councillors were usually Austrian, Ger-
man, Bohemian, Italian, and occasionally Hungarian aristocrats or
prelates. The administrative organ of the central government was the
Court Chancery, since 1620 separated from the Imperial Chancery. It
dealt with the domestic affairs of the monarchy as a whole and of Austria
in particular. From 1667 to 1683 an able and assiduous Rhinelander,
Dr Johann Paul Hocher, the son of a professor of Freiburg, was chan-
cellor. The functions of a central treasury were performed by the Court
Chamber ( Hofkammer ), which had been set up in 1527 as a financial
organ superior to the Chambers of the various lands of the monarchy.
The Hofkammer fixed and apportioned the budget and had general control
of commerce, manufacture, mints, and the gold and silver mines. Military
affairs were administered by the Court War Council ( Hofkriegsrat ) which
had been competent for all the Habsburg lands since 1556. In addition to
its military functions it conducted diplomatic relations with the Porte.
The Hofkriegsrat had a series of able presidents, Lobkowitz, Hannibal
Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, Raimondo Montecuccoli and Hermann,
margrave of Baden; it was characteristic of Habsburg government that
none of these was an Austrian or an Hungarian.
Once peace had been made in 1648 the immediate concern of Ferdi-
nand III was international. The welfare of neither his House nor his
monarchy had been advanced by either the war or the peace. The heredi-
tary enemy, France, was more powerful and dangerous than at any time
since Cateau-Cambresis (1559) and was still engaged in fighting success-
fully against Ferdinand’s Spanish kinsman. Fortunately there was no
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immediate danger from the sultan, except to the wretched Magyars,
Slovaks and Croats of the marches. The Turkish Empire sank to its nadir
when in 1 648 Ibrahim I was deposed and his seven-year-old son Mehmed IV
set up in his place. 1 Transylvania too for a brief period ceased to be a
trouble, for Gyorgy Rakoczi I died in the same year and it was seven years
before his son and successor, Gyorgy Rakoczi II, found the opportunity to
make his bid for a royal crown. Ever zealous for his House, Ferdinand’s
chief concern in his premature old age was to secure the succession of his
eldest son Ferdinand to all his titles and crowns. He had without diffi-
culty already got him crowned king of Bohemia in 1646 and of Hungary
in 1647. But the succession to the Imperial Crown was not so easily to be
had, partly because of the selfishness and greed of the Electors, flushed
with their recent successes at the peace conferences, partly because of
Mazarin’s lavish energy in seeking the election of anyone except a
Habsburg. The Electors after six months haggling elected the younger
Ferdinand in May 1653 at Augsburg and crowned him at Ratisbon in
June. But the death of Ferdinand IV in July 1654 made vain all the
patient diplomacy and the money taxed out of the peasants of Bohemia
and Spain. His younger brother Leopold was brought from his theo-
logical studies in Spain and the wearisome, costly business was begun
again. Leopold was crowned in Pressburg in 1655 and in Prague in
1657, but a renewal of war prevented Ferdinand HI from getting him
elected Emperor before his own death.
The war, which began in June 1655 with the invasion of Poland by
Charles X of Sweden, 2 concerned Austria not only because it threatened
to extend the hegemony of Protestant Sweden to central Europe, but
because it was a direct threat to the monarchy. Charles X was ambitious
to become king of Bohemia as well as Poland, a plan by no means
chimerical less than forty years after the Bohemian rebellion, especially
for a Protestant soldier-king of the genuine Gustavian stamp. Even more
immediately dangerous was it for Ferdinand when the reckless and
ambitious prince of Transylvania, Gyorgy Rakoczi II, saw in Charles of
Sweden the ally who might help his plans. As soon as Charles had cap-
tured Warsaw, Rakoczi in August 1655 sent envoys to him, and in Decem-
ber 1656 an alliance was concluded which promised to Rakoczi southern
and south-eastern Poland. Alarmed at this prospect of the Protestant
partition of the country Ferdinand began negotiations with the fugitive
and childless Polish king, John Casimir, but Ferdinand was dying and
could do no more. Rakoczi took a Transylvanian army by way of
Przemysl to Cracow and Sandomierz where he joined forces with the
triumphant Charles on 11 April 1657. Nine days earlier Ferdinand died
and his sixteen-year-old son succeeded to a situation as critical as that
1 See below, ch. xxi, pp. 504-5.
s See below, ch. xxn, p. 521, and ch. xxiv, p. 566.
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which had faced his grandfather on his accession in 1619. Within a month
he was at war with Sweden as Poland’s ally. Fortune favoured the new
ruler. First the Danish attack on Swedish territory in May 1657 caused
Charles X to desert Rakoczi in order to deal with this threat to his com-
munications; secondly the Turks turned on Rdkoczi. This was the first
warning Christendom had that there had been a revolution in Turkey.
There Mehmed Koprulti had become Grand Vizier in 1656. He ruthlessly
purged court and army of their sloth and corruption and was already
looking round for the opportunity to restore and extend the sultan’s
empire. 1 Koprulii had no desire to see the prince of Transylvania create
an independent kingdom for himself, and therefore, when R&koczi deposed
the voivode of Moldavia and summoned his successor and the voivode of
Wallachia to send him auxiliaries as if he were their lord, the sultan
ordered his vassal, the Khan of the Crimean Tatars, to drive the Tran-
sylvanian invaders out of Poland. R&koczi, deserted by his Swedish ally
and his Cossack auxiliaries and anxious about his homeland, in July 1657
hastily bought peace from the Poles at the cost of an indemnity of
1,200,000 florins and hurried back to Transylvania. He left part of his
forces in Poland under the gallant Jdnos Kemeny, but they were too few
to withstand the Tatar onslaught. At the battle of Trembowla, south of
Tamopol, on 31 July Kemeny’s troops were either slain or taken, together
with Kemeny, to imprisonment in the Crimea.
It was at this point that Austrian troops first began to participate in the
war. They assisted the Poles to recover Cracow and to restore John
Casimir. Another Austrian army, in co-operation with the Poles and
Brandenburgers, began a successful campaign against the Swedes on the
Baltic coast. Here the commander of the Austrian force, Montecuccoli,
first distinguished himself by his successful actions at Neumunster, Thom
and on Alsen Island.
It was not an inauspicious beginning to Leopold’s reign, but the
demands he had to make on his subjects for men and money from the day
of his accession were ominous. The taxation was made still heavier by the
enormous cost of bribing the Electors not to yield to the seductions of
Mazarin to elect, if not Louis XIV as Emperor, then some princeling who
would be a French puppet. Leopold and his fellow Habsburg, Philip IV
of Spain, were fearful not only of the loss of the Imperial dignity, but also
of the implied imperialism of France. Ultimately the stream of Habsburg
gold and the half-conscious fear of the German princes of French aggres-
sion secured the election of Leopold in July and his coronation at
Frankfurt in August 1658. 2
The most dangerous development during Leopold’s early years was the
revival of Turkish aggressive power by the Grand Vizier Mehmed
Koprulii. As long as it threatened merely Transylvania the government in
1 See below, ch. xxi, pp. 507-8. 1 See above, ch. xvm, p. 446.
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Vienna was not disturbed, even by the desperate appeals which began to
come from royal Hungary. There, ever since 1648, the sporadic Turkish
incursions had continued, threatening the frontier strongholds of Leva
and Gyor in 1652, which were saved only by Adam Forgach’s victory over
a force of 5000 Turkish marauders at Nagyverekes. A bitter struggle con-
tinued on the middle Danube frontier in south-west Hungary, waged by
the local magnates with no support from Vienna. Miklos Zrinyi, the Ban
of Croatia, boasted in Tassonian verse of Magyar bravery and bewailed
in prose the indifference and inaction of Leopold’s advisers, of whom he
said: ‘The blowing of the winds can no more still the raging of the sea
than princes can go against the advice of their councillors.’ 1
It was the subjection of Transylvania to the Turks which at last aroused
Vienna to the danger. After Rakoczi’s calamitous Polish adventure the
Transylvanian Estates, hoping to appease the Turks, elected Ferenc Redei
prince in November 1657. But Rakoczi was determined to save his
country and his title and in his turn bullied the Estates into recognising
him again in January 1658. The feeble Redei abdicated. R&koczi fought
and defeated the Turkish invaders at Lippa in May. But in September a
double assault, by the Tatar Khan from Wallachia and the Grand Vizier
himself from the south, led to the sack of Karlsburg and to the capture of
three of the most powerful strongholds of western Transylvania: Jeno,
Lugos and Karansebes. In the same month the Grand Vizier proclaimed
Akos Barcsay vassal prince of Transylvania, and in November the cowed
Estates recognised him. Rakoczi meanwhile was feverishly recruiting
forces on his Hungarian estates, whence in 1659 he advanced into Tran-
sylvania and drove his rival Barcsay to flight, and was again recognised by
the Estates. But in the same year Ahmed Sidi, the pasha of Buda, led a
Turkish army through the south-eastern counties from Temesvar to
Torda and Szeben (Hermannstadt), systematically sacking the frontier
fortresses in his path. It was clear that the Grand Vizier was going to
persist in his designs and that Rakoczi was too weak to save Transylvania
by himself. He turned to the king of Hungary in Vienna, and at last
Leopold was ready to help. His Imperial election had been accomplished;
Montecuccoli was bringing the Baltic war to a successful end; the new
president of his privy council, Johann Adolf von Schwarzenberg, was
ready for action against the Turks. In return for restoring to the Crown
the two counties of Szatmdr and Szabolcs, Rakoczi secured the promise of
military help. Leopold’s troops occupied Szatmar and Kallo, but they
made no attempt to fight the Turks until after the Austrian army of the
Baltic was released by the death of Charles X and the Peace of Oliva
early in 1660. 2 It was already too late. In the spring the pasha’s army had
made a great tour of destruction in north-eastern Hungary, beyond
1 Quoted by Szekfu in ‘H6man Bdlint 6s Szekfu Gyula’, Magyar Tortenet (Budapest,
1935 ). iv, 163. 3 See below, ch. xxiv, p. 568.
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Debrecen and then down into the heart of Transylvania to Kolozsvdr
(Klausenburg). Rlkoczi tried to stop the destructive tornado at Fenes,
some ten miles west of Kolozsvar, in May 1660, but was defeated and fled
mortally wounded to Nagyvarad where he died a fortnight later at the
age of thirty-nine. Ahmed Sidi came to Nagyvarad and besieged this
greatest of the cities of Transylvania. The Austrian general, Louis de
Souches, cautiously brought his force to neighbouring Rakamaz, from the
ramparts of which he idly watched the final assault on Nagyvarad when
the pasha took it on 27 August.
Even the fall of Nagyvarad did not end the death agony of Transylvania.
Kemeny having returned from his Crimean imprisonment, on new
year’s day 1661 the Transylvanian Estates elected him successor to Gyorgy
Rakoczi n. He prudently asked Austria for help and Montecuccoli was
appointed to lead the army of assistance. He would have preferred to
attack the Turks in Esztergom and Buda to distract them from Tran-
sylvania, but the War Council ordered him to join forces with Kemeny,
whose position was desperate. The Estates had arrested and executed his
rival, Barcsay, in September 1661, but the Turks were no longer willing to
tolerate a prince who was not their creature. The Grand Vizier Mehmed
died in October, but his son and successor, Fazil Ahmed Koprulii, was
no less able than he and no less zealous to complete the subjection of
Transylvania. Montecuccoli with 10,000 men had joined Kemeny on the
upper Tisza, but had done nothing to interrupt the great raid which the
sirdar, Ali Pasha, together with the Tatar Khans and the voivodes of
Wallachia and Moldavia had made into eastern Transylvania, in the course
of which the sirdar proclaimed as prince yet another Transylvanian mag-
nate, Mihaly Apafi. All Montecuccoli had done was to advance cautiously
to Kolozsvar where he found the city in the hands of the Turks; he had no
provisions or pay for his troops; the Magyars and Saxons were both
unfriendly. The Austrians therefore retired, leaving garrisons in the
northern Transylvanian fortresses. In 1662 the tragedy ended. A Turkish
army set out from Jen <5 under Mehmed Kucuk, caught Kemeny on
22 January at Nagyszollos near Segesvar (Schassburg) and there defeated
and killed him. The century of Transylvania’s meteoric and singular
greatness was over. Its fall shocked and frightened not only the Emperor
Leopold but the whole of Christendom. They realised that Transylvania
had been a dam, the destruction of which laid open royal Hungary to the
concentrated assault of the triumphant and eager Turks. The Grand
Vizier Fazil Ahmed gave Leopold no time to find allies or augment his
army. In April 1663 he set his forces in motion. His plan was to drive up
the Danube directly to Pressburg and Vienna. Nothing stood in his way
but the strong fortress of Neuhausel (Nove Zamky), which had imposed
a limit to the Turkish advance for more than a century. Within was a
garrison of Austrians and Hungarians under Adam Forgich. Behind him
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on the Vah stood Montecuccoli with a small force. In November the
straitly besieged garrison in Neuhausel forced Forgach to surrender; but
the stout defence had forced the Turks to postpone their assault on Vienna
till the next year.
Desperately the Emperor’s emissaries appealed to the rulers of Christen-
dom to come to save Austria, and so obviously urgent was the need that
even the Imperial Diet and the king of France responded. Pope Alex-
ander VH, Philip IV of Spain, Frederick William the Great Elector, and
other German princes sent men and money. Bohemia paid 2,000,000
guilders in taxes in this year 1664. Louis XIV allowed 6000 valuable
‘volunteers’ to go to the war. Before the Turks renewed their attack in
January 1664 Zrinyi tried to cut Fazil Ahmed’s lines of communication by
launching an attack into Turkish Hungary. But when in the summer
Fazil Ahmed at last moved, Zrinyi’s small Hungarian and Austrian force
had to retreat and the Grand Vizier was able to take the fortress of
Zerinvar, the last great stronghold in western Hungary. It was already
June and this southern campaign had given time for Montecuccoli to
assemble the motley army of Christendom to defend the line of the Raab,
some fifty miles east of Vienna. There on 1 August 1664 Montecuccoli
destroyed the great army of Fazil Ahmed as it tried to force a crossing of
the Raab near the monastery of St Gotthard. 1
The battle of St Gotthard was a great victory for Christian arms. It did
not indeed end for ever the threat to Vienna; it merely postponed it for
nineteen years. Leopold and his advisers made no attempt to follow up
the victory by pursuing the demoralised Turks to Buda and Transylvania,
but within ten days they concluded the Peace of Vasvar. 2 The terms pro-
vided for a twenty years’ truce; Transylvania was to be free of both
Turkish and Imperial occupation but to remain under the suzerainty of
the sultan; Leopold was to give a compensation of 200,000 florins to the
enemy he had just signally defeated and, what was even more dangerous,
was to allow the Turks to continue to occupy Nagyvarad and Zerinvar
and the three fortresses in western Slovakia which had hitherto provided
an insuperable barrier for the upper Danube : Neuhausel, Nitra and Leva.
The Peace of Vasvar at once began a heated argument which is not settled
today. On the one side, Austrians and Germans argued that it would have
been folly to attempt to expel the Turks from Hungary with the relatively
meagre forces available in 1664; to run the risk of another Mohacs might
have been fatal to Christendom. On the other side, Hungarians have
always regarded Vasvar as typical of Habsburg treachery. They argued
that once the Turks were demoralised by defeat and on the run they could
have made no effective stand anywhere north of the Sava and lower
Danube. They accuse the government in Vienna of having no desire to
see Hungary free and reunited ; they also maintain that the peace was made
1 See below, ch. xxi, p. 511. a See ibid.
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hastily and disadvantageous^ because Leopold had suddenly been dis-
tracted by the prospect of something far more attractive than the liberation
of Hungary or the expulsion of the Infidel. At the same Imperial Diet of
January and February 1664 which had been persuaded to send help to
Leopold in his great peril, John Philip von Schonbom, the Elector and
Archbishop of Mainz, had drawn the Emperor’s attention to the prob-
ability of the imminent demise of the Spanish king and of his only and
sickly infant son. Human motives are rarely unmixed and it may be
suggested that military caution and dynastic ambition combined to induce
Leopold and his advisers not to seize the opportunity presented by
St Gotthard.
Leopold’s interest in the future of Spain was fostered by his chief
ministers. The death of his mentor and first minister, Prince Porzia,
in 1665 brought to the head of the privy council first Count Johann
Auersperg and on his fall in 1669 Prince Wenzel Lobkowitz. These two
statesmen, the dour, cautious German and the intelligent, volatile Czech
aristocrat, were alike only in their devotion to the dynasty and their belief
that it would be foolishly hazardous to quarrel with Louis XIV when so
much might be obtained by agreement with him. When it was a question
of a successor to the childless John Casimir of Poland, who abdicated his
throne in September 1667, Habsburg diplomacy, in accordance with old
habit, supported the claims of a prince of the Empire, Charles, the son of
Duke Charles IV of Lorraine, against the younger Conde, the French
candidate. But when, after the death of Philip IV, Louis XIV sought to
anticipate the dissolution of the Spanish Empire by embarking on the
War of Devolution in May 1667, 1 Leopold did not join the Triple Alliance,
but sought to agree with his adversary. Leopold’s ablest diplomat, Count
Lisola, warned him that the French attack on the Spanish Netherlands
was ‘the beginning of the march of the enemy towards the gates of
Vienna’, 2 but he was unheeded. In January 1668 Leopold made a secret
treaty of partition with Louis XTV which would have given to him Spain,
Spanish America, Milan, Sardinia, the Balearic and Canary Islands, and
to France the Spanish Netherlands, Franche Comt6, Naples and Sicily,
Navarre, the Philippines and the Spanish posts in Africa.
Leopold’s preoccupation with the Spanish succession nearly cost him
his Hungarian Crown. The indifference to the fate of Hungary indicated
by the Peace of Vasvar convinced the Magyar magnates that they had
better make terms with the sultan if even the torso of the kingdom was to
be saved from Turkish conquest. Even those like the Palatine Ferenc
Wesselenyi who had hitherto been loyal to Leopold now turned to con-
spiracy and treason. Louis XIV was quick to perceive what profit might
1 See above, ch. ix, p. 210.
* Quoted by A. F. Pribram, Franz Paul, Freiherr von Lisola, 161 3-1674, und die Politik
seiner Zeit (Leipzig, 1894), p. 31 1.
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here be gained for France. He was already making his plans for the
destruction of the United Provinces and he was therefore pleased that
the Emperor should be distracted. His ambassador in Vienna, Jacques
Gremonville, by the expenditure of many words and a little money fanned
the flames of Hungarian discontent. He approached Miklos Zrinyi, but
he refused to betray his allegiance. Fortunately for him perhaps he was
torn to pieces by a hunted boar in September 1664. With the others
Gremonville was successful. The most reckless of the conspirators was
Peter Zrinyi, the successor to his brother Miklos’s estates and title, who
was ambitious to become prince of Transylvania. The Chief Justice of
Hungary, Ferenc Nadasdy, who hoped to succeed Wesselenyi as Palatine,
joined the plot. Some of the leading Protestant clergy of Slovakia and
north-eastern Hungary, fearful for their religious liberties, were also
persuaded to give their support.
As it became clear that Gremonville had no authority to commit
Louis XIV to any promise of effective support, the conspirators looked
more and more to the sultan for help. In August 1 666 Wesselenyi presided
over a meeting of the disaffected lords where it was proposed to col-
laborate with Apafi and get the Porte to promise to defend the liberties
of Hungary, which should be free to elect its own king and be independent
in foreign affairs in return for a fixed annual tribute to the sultan. Rarely
has a conspiracy been so long gestating and so soon betrayed by so many
of its participants. When Apafi sent an emissary to seek out the Grand
Vizier, Fazil Ahmed Koprulii, in the spring of 1667, one of the inter-
preters of the Imperial embassy in Constantinople heard of the plot and
reported it to Vienna. The death of Wesselenyi in April 1667 left the con-
spiracy without any authoritative leadership. But for three years more
the wretched and confused business of intrigues, betrayals and quarrels
went on. Any patriotic character the movement had once had was de-
stroyed by the ambitious rashness and the abject cowardice of the plotters.
The Turks were too busy with the long siege of Candia and their war with
Poland 1 to give any help. In turn Nadasdy, Wesselenyi’s widow and Peter
Zrinyi betrayed every ramification of the plot to the Austrians. Zrinyi
confessed, was pardoned and then intrigued again with the Turks. Lionne
and Gremonville revealed all they knew to Leopold. When at last the
young Ferenc Frangepan took to arms and tried to capture Zagreb, this,
the only military gesture of the whole conspiracy, was easily repressed by
an Austrian force in April 1670. Too late the northern counties set
military preparations afoot, but when they heard that Peter Zrinyi had
been arrested they desisted. The entire movement collapsed before mid-
summer. Procrastination, fatuity, inability to collaborate or organise,
conflicting personal ambitions, treachery and treason had put Hungary
helpless into the hands of its enemies.
1 For these see below, ch. xxi, pp. 510, 512.
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Lobkowitz eagerly accepted the opportunity to ‘put the Hungarians
into Czech trousers’. He entrusted the inquiry to an old enemy of the
Hungarians, the Austrian Chancellor Johann Hocher. Ignoring their
constitutional privilege of being tried by their Hungarian peers the govern-
ment arraigned Peter Zrinyi, Nadasdy and Frangepan before a purely
German court which, after playing cat and mouse with them for some
months, condemned them to death. They were beheaded in April 1671.
An Hungarian court presided over by the new primate, Gyorgy Szelep-
csenyi, archbishop of Esztergom, tried the lesser conspirators, three of
whom were executed. The treasury was greatly enriched by the confisca-
tion of the traitors’ estates. Some two thousand persons fled, mostly to
Transylvania, there to plot vengeance. All this made possible the use of
Montecuccoli’s old prescription for Hungary, military occupation. In
May 1670 Austrian troops crossed the Vah and reduced the kingdom to
the status of a conquered country. The principle of Austrian policy was
expressed by the Imperial Vice-Chancellor Leopold Wilhelm Konigsegg
in the words: ‘The Magyars rebelled and thereby have lost all their
privileges; henceforward they must be treated as armis subjecti.’ 1 In
March 1671 the counties and towns were ordered by royal decree to main-
tain the occupying troops stationed in them. Archbishop Szelepcsenyi
was nominated the king’s lieutenant in Hungary and a notorious enemy
of the Magyars, Leopold Kollonitsch, bishop of Wiener-Neustadt, was
made president of the Hungarian Chamber. In March 1673 Leopold
nominated a Gubernium to sit at Pressburg composed of four Germans
and four Hungarians. Its president and the real ruler of the kingdom was
Johann Gaspar Ampringen, titular Grand Master of the Teutonic
Knights. The Council governed by means of the army of occupation, whose
rapacity and cruelty were such that the papal nuncio in Vienna, Francesco
Buonvisi, expressed his alarm as to what the consequences might be.
The abrogation of the political liberties of Hungary seemed to the
Catholic prelates a heaven-sent opportunity to put an end to the galling
existence within the apostolic kingdom of the Protestant Churches.
Kollonitsch brought 12,000 soldiers from Vienna to assist Archbishop
Szelepcsenyi and his suffragans to suppress the Protestant churches and
schools in Pressburg, Sopron, Szentgyorgy and the mining towns of
Slovakia. The soldiers were followed by Jesuits, Franciscans and August-
inians who set up their religious houses and schools. Efforts to stop
Protestant worship in the frontier fortresses, however, met with such
resistance from their Hungarian garrisons that in 1674 the government in
Vienna called a halt to forceful recatholicisation. The prelates had recourse
to judicial process. From September 1673 until April 1674 Szelepscenyi
conducted in Pressburg a judicium delegatum to try those Protestant
1 O. Redlich (ed.), ‘Das Tagebuch Esaias Pufendorfs’, Mittheilungen des Instituts fur
osterreichische Geschichte (1916), p. 589.
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clergy who were suspected of having been party to the Wesselenyi con-
spiracy. More than two hundred of them were induced to sign an
undertaking to leave Hungary and never to return to preach or teach.
Forty pastors obstinately refused to sign and were condemned to the
Neapolitan galleys. Their sufferings there evoked loud protests from
Protestant States whom Leopold at this juncture least wished to alienate,
such as the United Provinces, Brandenburg, Saxony and Sweden. After
more than two years in the galleys the wretched convicts were rescued by
Admiral de Ruyter and were afforded asylum in Holland.
From 1671 to 1681 Leopold was unusually free from eastern problems.
Hungary had been crushed; the Turks were too much preoccupied with
their wars against Poland and Russia 1 in the struggle for the Ukraine to
be an immediate threat to Austria. The Emperor was therefore able to
devote his attention to the problem created by Louis XIV’s imperialism.
Leopold was not easily weaned from Lobkowitz’s policy of friendship
with France as the most promising means of getting the Spanish Crown.
But Louis’s obvious determination to destroy the United Provinces, his
occupation of the Imperial duchy of Lorraine in 1670, his alliance with
Sweden and his invasion of the United Provinces in the spring of i672 z at
last convinced Leopold that the Empire was threatened. He let Lisola
off the leash and in 1672, 1673 and 1674 alliances were made with the
Dutch, Spain, Brandenburg, Brunswick and Saxony. 3 In August 1672
Montecuccoli set out from Eger with 15,000 men, and for the next seven
years the wealth and the manpower of the Habsburg lands were deployed
in the costly and inconclusive struggle to reconquer Alsace and to prevent
Turenne and his successors from breaking through to the Danubian
high road to Vienna.
The maintenance of 50,000 men on the upper Rhine for so long a
period drained all Leopold’s realms of men and money, especially his
kingdom of Bohemia. Unhappy is the land which has no history.
Bohemia under the autocratic Habsburg rule was living through its age
of darkness, the Temno as the Czechs call it. But the gloomy decades were
in the year 1680 briefly lit up by the lurid flames of peasant rebellion.
There had been small, local stirrings of rural discontent in 1652, 1668 and
1673 as the lords’ demands for labour increased. The more general agita-
tion was provoked by the dearth of 1679 and the plague which invaded the
Habsburg lands from the Balkan peninsula. It ravaged Hungary in 1678
and Austria in 1679; despite some belated, primitive and ineffective pre-
cautions the plague reached Bohemia in 1680. Fifteen thousand, a third
of the population, died in Prague, 3500 of them in the Jewish ghetto.
Leopold’s presence in Bohemia, whither he had fled to escape the plague
in Vienna, seemed to some of the Bohemian peasants an opportunity for a
1 See below, ch. xxiv, p. 569. * See above, ch. k, pp. 215-17.
* See above, ch. ix, pp. 217-18.
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direct appeal to his benevolence. Early in 1680 a group of serfs living in
northern Bohemia presented a petition to the king which he accepted.
But when other serfs from all parts of the country were thereby encour-
aged to follow suit the lords, fearing lest the kindly Leopold might be
moved to do something, began to arrest and imprison the deputations
elected by the peasants and induced Leopold to issue a patent which
forbade direct appeals to the king and directed them to the presidents of
the district courts. A proclamation followed which declared that all
servile privileges and liberties dating from before the ‘foul rebellion’ of
1618 were abolished.
Thereupon some of the more radical of the peasants’ leaders began to
preach open revolt. In many districts of northern and western Bohemia
the serfs refused their predial services and made armed demonstrations
against the landlords and their stewards. At once a force of soldiers under
Colonel Christopher Harant was sent to repress the rebellion. He went
from eastern through northern to western Bohemia; most of the peasant
bodies dispersed at the mere news of his approach. There were a few
skirmishes, but as it was illegal for a serf to own arms, the peasants,
armed for the most part only with scythes, flails and sickles, could not
withstand Harant’s well-trained troops. The only fighting on anything
but the smallest scale was at Celiv in the Plzen district, where two com-
panies of cuirassiers supported by artillery dispersed the peasants, and
near Cestina in the Caslav district. More than a hundred peasants were
killed in these two skirmishes. All those who were captured with any sort
of arms in their hands were hanged forthwith. By the end of April the
rising had been suppressed. A criminal commission supported by troops
was sent round the disaffected districts to discover and try the leaders.
Some hundred persons were convicted and executed by hanging, behead-
ing, quartering or impaling. Ten times that number were sent to forced
labour or to prison in the lords’ or Hungarian gaols. In June 1680 the
king issued a robotni patent which, while it acknowledged the inhumanity
of some of the lords, yet recognised as legal most of the innovations made
since 1620. The patent fixed the normal maximum of robota at three days
a week from each peasant holding, except for the com and hay harvest
and for harvesting the fish-ponds, ‘ but the lords should see to it that the
serfs should get some reward for these extraordinary services *. 1 On those
estates where less than three days’ work a week was customary it was not
to be increased. This patent of 1680 afforded only temporary and imperfect
relief; in many places it was disregarded.
The autocratic Austrian rule of Hungary by Ampringen and the
Gubernium proved unable to conciliate the nation or to give it peace and
order. The exiles of 1671, organised into an army of patriots (the famous
1 See Ceskoslovenska Vlastiveda , vol. iv, ‘DSjiny’, ed. V. Novotny, p. 531.
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kurucok) by Count Mihdly Teleki, supplied with money by the Tran-
sylvanian prince, Apafi, who like Teleki was a zealous Calvinist, made
their base in the no-man’s-land of north-eastern Hungary where they held
out, homeless, landless, quarrelling, robbing, constantly hunted by General
Spankau’s mercenaries. Teleki tried to take advantage of Louis XIV’s
anti-Habsburg diplomacy which was endeavouring to get John Sobieski,
king of Poland, Apafi and the ‘exiles’ to harry Leopold from the rear.
The attack was launched by Teleki’s fellow exile, Imre Thokoly, a clever,
restless young aristocrat of twenty-two. His birth, education and wealth
attracted many to the ranks of the kurucok: proscribed landlords and
peasants, Slovaks as well as Magyars. In the summer of 1678 Thokoly
with the help of French officers and Polish mercenaries began his attempt
to drive the Austrians out of northern Hungary. It was a merciless war on
both sides, disgraced by the exacerbation of religious zeal. Archbishop
Szelepcsenyi had eighteen Protestant pastors put to death for supporting
Thokoly; he on his part wherever he came suppressed the religious orders
and handed over Catholic churches to the Protestants. The Catholics
closed the Protestant schools at Presov and Sarospatak; Thokoly closed
the Jesuit colleges at Uzhorod and Kosice. Neither of the two Austrian
generals, the veteran Walther Leslie or his successor Aeneas Sylvius
Caprara, was able to prevent Thokoly and the kurucok from occupying
the mining towns of central Slovakia or from raiding as far to the north
and west as Silesia and Moravia. By 1680 he had occupied nearly all the
counties of northern and western Hungary.
It was clear to the more far-sighted statesmen of Christendom that the
situation was very dangerous. The Turks, frustrated in the Ukraine, were
much interested in the potentialities of Thokoly’s campaign. There was a
feeling that Ampringen would never succeed in taming Hungary. It was
the new pope. Innocent XI, who took the lead in the reconciliation of
Leopold, Louis XIV and Hungary. Innocent was the most zealous
crusading pope since Pius II. In 1677 he sent Buonvisi to Vienna to win
over the Emperor and within a year the nuncio got the Hungarian mag-
nates to confer in Vienna with Leopold’s ministers. After peace had been
made in the west at Nymegen 1 Leopold summoned the Hungarian
Estates to meet at Sopron in May 1681. There he purchased the support
of the Hungarian lords by restoring the liberties of the kingdom. The
Estates recovered their right to elect a Palatine; the Lieutenancy and
Gubernium were abolished ; the Hungarian Chamber was made indepen-
dent once more; the principle that offices of State should be filled by
Hungarians was recognised; the Estates were to meet every third year;
finally, the Protestants were given back the liberties of 1608 and the exiled
pastors were allowed to return.
This dramatic volte face was made only just in time. Thokoly realised
1 See above, ch. ix, p. 219.
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that the conciliation of Leopold and the Estates meant that he could not
remain master of Hungary without Turkish help, and Kara Mustafa,
Fazil Ahmed Kopriilu’s successor as Grand Vizier, was now ready to
interfere, for he believed that the time was ripe for the overthrow of the
Habsburg Empire. Thokoly was received with great pomp by the pasha of
Buda in the summer of 1682 and at once a joint army of kurucok and
Turks embarked on the conquest of Hungary. They speedily captured the
north-eastern strongholds of Kosice, Presov, Levoca and, at the cost of
4000 Turkish dead, Fid’iakovo. Thereupon the pasha Ibrahim delivered
to Thokoly the athnam of Mehmed IV which declared Thokoly to be king
of all Hungary and Croatia, as tributary vassal of the sultan. The new
conquerors of upper Hungary proved to be a plague worse than the
Austrian army of occupation had been. Tatar and Szekler horsemen
burnt villages and carried off the people to slavery; the Turks’ camels
devoured gardens and vineyards; the frontier fortresses were demolished.
At the end of 1682 Leopold was glad to purchase time to find allies and an
army by making a truce with Thokoly which left all Hungary east of the
Hron in his hands. All was ready for the sultan and his Grand Vizier to
embark on the campaign which they believed would accomplish what
Suleiman the Magnificent had failed to achieve in 1 529.
Leopold was still anxiously watching the activities of Louis XLV’s
Chambres de Reunions 1 as he was the preparations of the Turks, and it was
the pope who through his nuncios played the greatest part in creating the
Christian coalition of Austria, the princes and Diet of the Empire, and
the Poles. The crucial alliance with John Sobieski was not concluded until
31 March 1683, the very day that Mehmed IV and Kara Mustafa set out
with their great host from Adrianopie. They were joined in Hungary by
Apafi and the Transylvanian army. Thokoly renewed the war in western
Slovakia but failed to take the key point of Pressburg. When Duke
Charles of Lorraine, the commander-in-chief of the Christian army, heard
of the approach of the enemy towards Gy6r he withdrew westwards,
leaving Hungary to its fate and Vienna to withstand a siege. From July
the garrison of Vienna under the leadership of Count Rudiger von Star-
hemberg bravely defended itself, until on 12 September Sobieski’s relieving
army swept down from the heights of the Kahlenberg to rout the Turks
and to deliver Christendom for ever from the spectre of Muslim conquest
which had haunted it for three centuries. 2
The great victory of Vienna stilled as many fears and evoked as much
rejoicing as Lepanto, with greater justification, for its consequences were
much more substantial and enduring. Like Lepanto it was a joint victory
of pope and Emperor. Moreover it marked the advent of Austria to the
position of a great power. It was Leopold, and not Louis XIV, who now
1 For these, see above, ch. ix, pp. 219-20.
* For details of the siege and relief of Vienna see below, ch. xxi, pp. 515-17.
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stood at the pinnacle of glory, and in the years that followed, while Louis’s
great armies were struggling obscurely and unsuccessfully in the labyrinth
of the War of the League of Augsburg, Leopold’s army under the aegis of
the refurbished Crown of St Stephen was hammering the Infidel back
beyond the Danube and the Carpathians. The war of Hungarian libera-
tion was veritably a crusade, the final achievement of the victorious
Counter-Reformation. It was Innocent XI who organised the Holy
League of the Emperor, the king of Poland and Venice at Linz in March
1684; it was his plan that the allies should attack simultaneously in
Hungary, in Moldavia and in Greece. The pope brought the Curia almost
to penury so that he might spend every florin on the war; the monasteries
of the monarchy were taxed a third of their incomes. Cardinal Buonvisi
not only administered all this money; he prepared military plans and kept
the irresolute Leopold up to the mark.
The expulsion of the Turks from Hungary was not a short or an easy
task. 1 It occupied sixteen years, and at one point, when in 1688 Mustafa
Kopriilu, brother of the great Fazil Ahmed, became Grand Vizier, it
looked as if all the gains of six victorious years might be lost. But despite
this dying spasm of energy, the Turks had been fatally crippled by the
political disasters which followed on their defeat before Vienna. 2 What
ensured their expulsion from Hungary was the size of the Christian army
and the skill with which it was deployed. In the terrible battle which led
to the recovery of Buda on 2 September 1686 an army of 40,000 men took
part : Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians, Brandenburgers, Swabians, Franco-
nians, Bavarians, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards, and even a few Englishmen
and Scots. The superiority of the Imperial generals was shown in such
battles as Charles of Lorraine’s great victory in 1687 at Nagyharsany,
almost on the field of Mohacs, which restored southern Hungary to the
Habsburgs after nearly a hundred and fifty years of Turkish rule.
The expulsion of the Turks was a mixed blessing for Hungary, for by
1687 Leopold was sufficiently master of the whole country to think the
time ripe for putting an end to the liberties which he had been compelled
to grant in 1681. He summoned the Estates to Pressburg in October 1687
and coerced them into declaring the Hungarian Crown to be no longer
elective, but hereditary in the male line of the House of Habsburg. Die
treasured paragraph 31 of the Golden Bull of 1222, which gave the
Hungarian lords the right of insurrectio against any king who offended
against the charter, was abrogated. The Estates ceased to meet and
Hungary was at last reduced to the provincial status in which Bohemia
had already existed for sixty years.
The principality of Transylvania was more fortunate in the conse-
1 For a fuller account of the expulsion of the Turks from Hungary see vol. vi of this
History, ch. xix.
* See below, ch. xxi, pp. 517-18.
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THE HABSBURG LANDS
quences of its liberation from the Turks than was the rest of Hungary.
When Mustafa Kopriilii became Grand Vizier and embarked on the great
counter-offensive of 1690 he saw that he must secure Transylvania as a
bridgehead north of the lower Danube. Therefore, when Prince Apafi died
in April, the sultan nominated Thokoly as prince of Transylvania and
sent him with a force which defeated the Imperial and Transylvanian
army at Zemyest in August. Louis of Baden was therefore compelled to
turn to Transylvania with his main army, even though it meant allowing
the Grand Vizier to reconquer Vidin and Belgrade and all the recently
recovered territory south of the Sava. The battle which decided the fate of
Transylvania was fought on 19 August 1691 at Zalankemen near the
confluence of the Tisza. Louis was completely victorious. Twenty
thousand Turks and Mustafa Kopriilii were killed, though Thokoly
escaped. The constitutional position of Transylvania within the Habsburg
monarchy was defined in the two diplomata Leopoldiana published in
Vienna in October 1690 and December 1691. The principality was not
reincorporated in Hungary, but was subordinated directly to Vienna,
though it was allowed to enjoy some vestiges of autonomy. It owed
allegiance to the Habsburg king. The co-existence of Catholic, Calvinist,
Lutheran and anti-Trinitarian faith and practice was allowed to continue.
Though the Transylvanian Estates continued to meet and to legislate, the
principality was in fact administered by a governor and council appointed
by the king. This was to remain its constitutional position until 1848.
The Turks did not easily concede victory to Leopold. For six years
after Zalankemen they fought desperately and sometimes successfully
against the incompetent successors of Louis of Baden and the Imperial
army now further diminished by the demands of the western war against
France. The election of Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, as king
of Poland in 1697 sealed the fate of the Turks, for it brought as his suc-
cessor to the command of the Imperial forces Eugene of Savoy. On
4 September 1697 he destroyed the last effective Turkish army at Zenta on
the lower Tisza. Through Lord Paget, the English ambassador to the
Porte, Sultan Mustafa II began negotiations for peace. The maritime
powers urged Leopold to terminate the eastern war in view of the immi-
nence of the death of Charles II of Spain. Near the ruined village of
Carlowitz on the lower Drava the plenipotentiaries of the Emperor, the
sultan, Poland, Russia and Venice concluded the peace by which the
Turks renounced the whole of Hungary and Transylvania to Leopold,
with the exception of the so-called Banat of Transylvania, that is the area
in south-east Hungary between the Maros, the lower Tisza, the Danube
and the Wallachian frontier. Belgrade remained in Turkish hands. With
the exception of the Banat and of Lusatia Leopold I now ruled all the
lands of the Empire which Ferdinand I had created, and he ruled them
with an absolute authority which Ferdinand would have envied.
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CHAPTER XXI
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
UNDER MEHMED IV
S ultan mehmed iv who ascended the throne in 1648 inherited a
vast empire which had been conquered by the sword of his ancestors
and stretched over three continents. In Europe the frontier of the
Ottoman Empire was a mere eighty miles from Vienna; in North Africa
only Morocco did not belong to it; it included Upper Egypt and extended
to Aden; the Black Sea and the Red Sea were Turkish lakes; in the east it
stretched to the shores of the Caspian and of the Persian Gulf. It is impos-
sible to give the exact figure of its population, but in the seventeenth
century it amounted to approximately 25 or 30 millions. The Turks,
although the dominant race, were only a minority. Probably the Muslims
— Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Bosnians, Albanians, Circassians, Crimean
Tatars and Turkic peoples of the Caucasus — were stronger than the
Christians — Greeks, Serbs, Hungarians, Bulgars, Wallachians and
Moldavians. Outstanding among the Turks of this period were the
famous historian, geographer and bibliographer Katib Tchelebi (1609-
57) and the renowned traveller Evliya Tchelebi (1611-78), who described
the cities, customs and peoples of the Ottoman Empire in his huge ten
volumes. Its heart was the city of Constantinople (Istanbul), the seat of
the military and administrative institutions of the empire, the centre of
commerce and culture as well as amusement and pleasures. It was
inhabited by more than half a million people, Muslims, Christians and
Jews, all living side by side for centuries, observing their own customs.
The city contained the palace of the sultans, the Serail, the splendid
mosques of Sultan Ahmed, Suleymaniye, Bayezid, Selimiye and Sultan
Mehmed the Conqueror, many Medresse ' s (colleges), libraries, public
baths, hospitals, inns and food distribution centres, maintained by pious
endowments. The ‘second capital’ of the empire was the city of Adri-
anople, where the sultans spent many of their leisure hours, and which
served the army as a base at the beginning of a campaign against the
Christian powers. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina stood under the
sultan’s special care, for as the caliph it was his duty to protect these
places, which were visited every year by hundreds of thousands of pil-
grims from every comer of the Muslim world, and to give large donations
to them.
Basically the empire was an agricultural country with many fertile
areas, and taxes on land and farming were the principal source of revenue.
The methods of agriculture, however, were very primitive and the tools
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used were rudimentary. The status of the peasants was that of serfs ; the
Muslim peasants gave the tithes from com and were subject to many other
obligations, while the Christian peasants in addition had to pay the
Djizye or poll-tax which exempted them from military service, its amount
varying according to the peasants’ status and incomes. As the empire
dominated the main trade routes from the Mediterranean to the East,
trade, although hampered by many obstacles, played an important part.
Constantinople and Smyrna were the main centres of trade with foreign
countries, while Adrianople, Brussa and Thessalonica were famous
internal trading centres. The customs duties were another source of large
revenues. There were many Jewish, Greek and Armenian merchants, for
the Turks as a rule considered trade derogatory to their honour and
preferred military and administrative appointments. Foreign merchants
too were extremely active and enjoyed a privileged position, for example
with regard to the payment of customs for imported goods. The leading
position was held by the English Levant Company which had succeeded
in ousting the Venetians and the French. Venetian cloth, however, was
imported side by side with English cloth for the use of the upper classes, as
were precious furs from Russia. Coffee came from the Yemen, and
tobacco was imported by English and Dutch merchants : although severe
penalties were imposed for smoking it spread rapidly, and tobacco culti-
vation began at this time.
The stability and security of the empire rested on its army, an ancient
institution going back to the fourteenth century. It consisted of the
standing army known as the Janissaries and provincial feudal levies raised
by the tenants of fiefs held on a military tenure. Each tenant according to
the amount of his revenue was obliged to equip and mount a certain
number of horsemen and to participate with them in the campaigns. This
system provided the army with something like 100,000 horsemen, but it
had become corrupt and inefficient. Fiefs were often distributed illegally,
and the obligations to render military services were ignored although
legally such a refusal should have ended the period of tenure. The corps
of the Janissaries ( Yenitcheri or new troops) had been founded in the
fourteenth century and was based on the system of Devshirme, the con-
scription of Christian children from the Balkans. They were converted to
Islam, educated and trained under special regulations and a severe
discipline : this highly superior force had enabled the Turks to make their
great conquests. The corps was divided into more than 150 orta's of
varying size, known by their numbers and with their special standards and
ensigns. The soldiers wore uniforms, lived in barracks, and received
wages according to the length of their service as well as a special bakhshish
on the occasion of the accession of a new sultan. The total strength of the
corps amounted to about 50,000 men, but its discipline and power as a
fighting force had declined. The problem of controlling the mutinous
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Janissaries was of vital importance, for their outrages shook the founda-
tions of the empire. Furthermore, during the reign of Mehmed IV the
system of Devshirme was abolished, and only Muslims, especially the sons
of Janissaries, were conscripted for the corps, another factor contributing
to its decline. Apart from the Janissaries, the standing army had smaller
numbers of gunners, bombardiers, sappers, drivers and armourers.
The navy too was of great importance, the admiralty occupying a large
area at the Golden Horn where new ships were built and damaged ones
repaired. The sailors were mainly recruited from the Greek population and
known as Levend’s (a corruption of the Italian word Levantino). But the
Ottoman navy had equally decayed, so that the Venetians could establish
their mastery not only in the Mediterranean but even in the Aegean Sea,
with fatal consequences for the Ottomans. In other fields too their innate
conservatism prevented them from making the necessary changes and
adjustments. No attention was paid to the rapidly changing economic
conditions and the technical advances made in Europe. Many important
posts were given to unqualified people and administrative appointments
often went to the highest bidders.
The Ottoman Empire had reached its zenith during the reign of
Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66); it then possessed well-developed and
efficient institutions which matched its political greatness. But Suleiman’s
successors, with only two exceptions, lacked the gifts and the enthusiasm
of their predecessors and no longer played a conspicuous part in public
life, preferring to stay behind the walls of the Serail. As early as the later
sixteenth century, the reign of Murad HI, there were signs of decline. The
government was subject to intrigues by the sultan’s favourite wives or to
the influence of the queen mother. The chief of the harem, a black eunuch,
often played a part in the most important affairs of State, while the sultan
ceased to be an active ruler. According to the established tradition the
government rested in the hands of the Grand Vizier, who exercised far-
reaching powers. Yet, until the accession of the Koprulus in 1656, the
intrigues of the Serail and the interference of the sultan’s favourites caused
a decline of the Grand Vizier’s authority and of the whole system of
government. The Divan (Council) which was presided over by the Grand
Vizier and was attended by certain other Viziers and high dignitaries,
such as the Kadis of Rumelia and Anatolia, was only a consultative
organ.
As the empire was a Muslim State the Mufti (Sheikh-ul-Islam) played
an important part in the government. He was the head of all Muslim
legal and spiritual institutions and enjoyed a privileged status. His
approval was required for many important decisions, such as the declara-
tion of war, the conclusion of peace, or the deposition of a sultan. In con-
trast with the Grand Vizier, the Mufti was never executed if found guilty,
but only exiled. Less important than the Mufti were the Kadis (judges)
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who also had many other duties. In their districts they had to carry out
the instructions of the central government and to supervise the munici-
palities and the supply of food. The highest among the Kadis was the
Kadi of Rumelia, and after him the Kadi of Anatolia; they were the
judges of the army and judicial matters concerning the army came under
their jurisdiction. The legal system was based on Islamic law, the Sheriat,
a knowledge of which was essential in the judicial and administrative
spheres.
The empire was divided into thirty-two provinces, the most important
of which were Rumelia, Anatolia, and the territories along the coasts of
the Aegean and the Mediterranean. The latter stood under the jurisdiction
of Kapudan Pasha, the Grand Admiral, while the other important pro-
vinces were administered by BeylerbeyV s, appointed by the central govern-
ment, who received high salaries and large lands as fiefs. They exercised
legislative and executive powers, had to supervise the fulfilment of
certain military duties connected with the levy of troops and to participate
in campaigns as the commanders of the troops of their provinces. Among
the military obligations which they supervised was the institution of Timar
which obliged their holders to render feudal services. The smaller pro-
vinces were governed by ValV s, also appointed from Constantinople. The
provinces were subdivided into Sandjak's (standard of an army unit)
which corresponded to the districts from which a certain number of troops
was recruited. The Sandjak was in the charge of a Sandjakbeyi, the
political and military representative of the central government, who also
held a large fief, was responsible for recruiting in his district and com-
manded its troops during a campaign. The system thus combined military
and administrative functions to an extraordinary degree; it appeared to be
highly centralised, but in reality it proved impossible to maintain order in
the remote provinces and to control the powerful governors. Incompe-
tent men were frequently appointed governors of provinces and districts,
who then extorted illegal impositions from the population.
Certain provinces, such as Damascus, Yemen, Abyssinia and Egypt,
enjoyed a special status and separate privileges. The system of taxes and
obligations which were imposed on the Turkish provinces, for example
the institution of Timar, was not applied in Egypt and the Arab provinces.
Egypt was not only one of the principal sources of revenue, but also an
important centre of commerce and the granary of the empire. Almost the
entire burden of maintaining the government and the armed forces fell on
the Turkish provinces proper; but only Muslims had to render military
services, while non-Muslims paid instead the Djizye or poll-tax. The
Christian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia possessed autonomous
status. Their princes were appointed by the Porte, but their subjects were
not obliged to military services, nor were the principalities garrisoned by
Turkish forces. They had to provide corn and sheep for the Ottoman
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army and owed tribute to the Porte, otherwise they were administered
according to local customs. The same applied to the Khanate of the
Crimea, which was an autonomous Muslim state whose Khans were
installed and deposed by the Porte. They were watched by the Ottoman
governors of Kaffa and Ozii, who intervened when necessary. The Tatar
Khans paid no tribute, but were obliged to participate in Turkish cam-
paigns with some 20,000 to 30,000 horsemen, who served as the advance
guard of the army, and had to defend the Ottoman territories against the
raids of the Dnieper and Don Cossacks. In their turn, the Tatars nearly
every year raided Poland and Russia and took many prisoners whom they
shipped from Kaffa or Azak to sell them as slaves in Constantinople or
Egypt. Looser still were the links of the Barbary States — Tripolis, Tunis
and Algiers — with the Ottoman Empire. They were more or less inde-
pendent, had their own military and administrative organisation, and
their obligations towards the Porte did not exceed certain presents which
they sent to the sultan.
While in Europe new ideas were developing in many fields, the institu-
tions and society of the Ottoman Empire lost their dynamic character and
began to stagnate and to decline. The gap between Orient and Occident
became wider, especially in the field of technology, but the Ottomans were
not aware of this fact. They continued to regard their empire as the
strongest in the world, and their Islamic way of life as the best. Nor did
the European powers notice the weakness of the Ottoman Empire — until
the catastrophe before Vienna opened the eyes of the contemporaries and
the real situation began to be appreciated.
As the empire was governed in the form of a medieval despotism with
the corresponding institutions, the ability and the competence of the
sultan and of the Grand Vizier were vitally important. When, in the person
of Murad IV (1623-40), an energetic and competent sultan ascended the
throne the Ottomans’ financial and military power revived. The anarchy
and corruption of the preceding reigns were brought to an end, and the
lands which had been lost to Persia were reconquered at the cost of much
bloodshed. During the reign of Murad’s brother Ibrahim (1640-8), how-
ever, the signs of decline became more marked. The sultan spent his days
and nights in the pursuit of his passions and his mental health deteriorated
quickly. The misgovernment and abuses spread to the provinces where
local rebellions broke out. In addition to these mutinies the Venetians
and the Cossacks invaded the Ottoman Empire. The Venetians soon
succeeded in occupying the islands of Lemnos and Tenedos, and thus in
blockading the Dardanelles and threatening Constantinople itself. In
these circumstances, which threatened the spread of anarchy and the out-
break of revolution, some influential persons persuaded the Grand Mufti
and Kosem sultan (the sultan’s mother) that Ibrahim must be deposed.
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This was accomplished in August 1648, and Ibrahim’s son Mehmed, then
seven years old, ascended the throne. Eleven days later Ibrahim, to prevent
him from regaining power and challenging the succession of Mehmed,
was murdered. As Murad IV had killed three of his brothers, Ibrahim
being the only exception, Mehmed and his younger brother were indeed
the only surviving male members of the Ottoman dynasty, so that the
news of Mehmed’s birth had been greatly welcomed throughout the
empire, in spite of certain bad omens.
Mehmed was much too young to assume the government himself, and
it remained in the hands of successive Grand Viziers as well as Mehmed’s
grandmother and his mother Turhan who was of Russian descent. There-
fore the instability of government continued and intrigues were rife at the
palace; this was soon reflected in the spread of robberies and rebellions
in the provinces. In the war with the Venetians the fortress of Canea on
the island of Crete had been conquered by the Turks during the reign of
Ibrahim; but it was now necessary to send reinforcements to Crete and
to lift the blockade of the Dardanelles which the Venetians had imposed
in return. Thus in 1649 the Turkish fleet set sail from Chanak, only to
suffer another defeat at the hands of the Venetians. Thereupon the Grand
Vizier Sofu Mehmed Pasha was dismissed and executed. But the struggle
for power between Kosem, Mehmed’s grandmother, and Turhan, his
mother, continued. In this struggle Kosem relied on the support of the
Janissaries and planned the elimination of the other party through the
accession of Mehmed’s younger brother, Suleiman. When her plans were
nearing completion and an agreement had been reached with the leaders
of the Janissaries, she was murdered in September 1651 by the partisans
of Turhan. This was followed by the execution of her accomplices, so that
the Janissaries lost their influence for the time being and that of Turhan,
supported by the palace eunuchs, became supreme. The Grand Viziers
and government officials were appointed according to their wishes, while
the education and training of the young sultan were completely neglected.
He spent most of his time with toys and games and soon developed an
interest in the hunt which became the great passion of his life. This
tendency was encouraged by his mother who thus achieved complete
mastery in the State. Therefore Mehmed IV was called ‘the Hunter’ by
the Ottoman chroniclers : a passion he was unable to give up even when
his army was marching on Vienna and when it had been annihilated before
its walls — a passion which became the cause of his deposition and
imprisonment. He never showed much interest in literature or the art of
government.
In the person of Tarhondju Ahmed Pasha a Grand Vizier of great
honesty was appointed by Turhan in June 1652. At this time the revenue
for the following two years had been anticipated and the coinage debased.
The new Grand Vizier attempted to restore the shattered economy of the
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Empire and put forward a budget, according to which the revenue was
estimated at 14,503 purses of silver and the expenditure at 16,400, leaving
a small deficit of 1900 purses; 1 but the real difficulty arose from the fact
that the taxes of the two following years had already been levied so that
very little revenue could be expected for the time being. The bulk of the
expenditure — about 10,000 purses — was allocated to the army and the
navy; of this sum, 3866 purses went to the corps of Janissaries which then
numbered 51,647 registered soldiers, and only 988 purses to the navy
which comprised fifty galleons and thirteen galleys. 966 purses were
allocated to the Imperial kitchen and 255 to the Imperial stables. In view
of the financial situation a veritable hunt for money set in, for the soldiers
had to be paid regularly. New arbitrary duties were introduced and even
the estates of rich people were confiscated. Drastic measures were
employed to curtail favouritism and the illegal levies made by followers
of the Grand Mufti. But these proceedings antagonised many influential
people: their intrigues were eventually successful in bringing about the
downfall of Tarhondju Ahmed Pasha, and with him fell his policy of
reform. He was dismissed from office after only nine months and
immediately executed.
His successors were equally unable to solve the administrative and
financial difficulties of the empire. The Grand Vizier Ibshir Pasha was
executed in August 1655. Revolts broke out in Asia Minor; taxation
continued at a very high level; the provincial governors showed an
entirely irresponsible attitude. The threat from the Venetians did not
diminish and their admiral, Lazzaro Mocenigo, gained a great victory
over the Turkish navy, while the struggle for the possession of Crete con-
tinued unabated. On account of the Venetian blockade of the Dardanelles
the transport of food and supplies to Constantinople nearly came to a
standstill and prices rose steeply. Among the citizens there was grave
anxiety and dissatisfaction because the government failed to take any
security measures to protect the capital against an attack through the
Straits. Many complaints were made to the palace and the officials con-
cerned ; but the Grand Vizier Mehmed Pasha was unable to decide what
measures should be taken, and the sultan was busy hunting at Scutari, on
the opposite side of the Bosporus. The Divan met, but with no result.
It became clear that the government was incapable of dealing with the
internal and external dangers, that an able man must be appointed Grand
Vizier, and that drastic measures had to be taken to cope with the situa-
tion. Those who realised its gravity approached the sultan’s mother,
Turhan, because no important decisions could be taken without her
assent. The chief architect of the palace suggested to her that the appoint-
ment of Kopriilii Mehmed Pasha, an Albanian like himself, to the post of
Grand Vizier would solve the difficulties. This was accepted by Turhan,
1 The ‘purse’ (kese) of silver was worth 500 piastres.
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and the seal of the office was offered to Koprulu who was then seventy-one
years old. Previously he had served in various official posts, in the palace
and in the Treasury, on the staff of a former Grand Vizier and as the
governor of several provinces, but he had been out of office since 1655.
He lacked the education required for the post of Grand Vizier, but he
was shrewd, very experienced and had a sound knowledge of the govern-
ment machine and its defects. Accordingly he put forward several condi-
tions on which he would be prepared to accept the office: no criticisms of
the Grand Vizier should be permitted or taken into account; no vizier
should be entitled to oppose the proceedings of the Grand Vizier; there
should be no interference with the appointment of officials, regardless of
rank; and all the reports presented to the court should go through the
hands of the Grand Vizier. Turhan, on behalf of her son, agreed to these
terms and Kopriilu was installed in office in September 1656: the eleventh
Grand Vizier of the reign which until then had lasted only eight years. He
remained in office until his death in 1661, and during that time he was in
an extremely strong position.
On his appointment Koprulu carried through a purge of the govern-
ment offices. Those notorious for their irregularities were dismissed,
among them great dignitaries such as the Chief Treasurer and the Grand
Mufti, as was also the commander-in-chief of the navy. The Chief Eunuch,
the principal engineer of intrigues in the Serail, was exiled to Egypt.
Many new Kadis and magistrates were appointed. Koprulu, however,
not satisfied with the removal of those whom he distrusted, had many of
his opponents and potential rivals exterminated. The admiral, who was
considered responsible for the fall of Lemnos, and the commander of the
Janissaries, who was found guilty of lack of discipline, were executed.
So were a tax-collector accused of cruelty towards the people and the
governor of Silistria indicted for his ill-treatment of the Tatars. The
Orthodox Patriarch, Parthenios III, was hanged, being accused of having
provoked the Hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia to revolt against the
Turks. Many pashas, viziers, agas and senior provincial officials who
had incurred the Grand Vizier’s enmity suffered the same fate. Altogether
the number of the victims is said to have reached 50,000 to 60,000. All
unnecessary expenditure was curtailed, and a campaign against corruption
was launched. According to the budget of 1660 the revenue was estimated
at 14,53 1 i purses (hardly more than in 1652), and the expenditure at
14,840 purses, leaving an insignificant deficit. In contrast with 1652,
however, the revenue had not been anticipated so that the financial situa-
tion had greatly improved. In general, Koprulu was no innovator but
was satisfied with making the existing machinery of government work well
and with the strict enforcement of the existing laws.
Rebellions against the government were put down with great severity.
Among these the revolt of Abaza Hasan Pasha in Asia Minor constituted
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a real danger to the government in the years 1657-8. Its centre was at
Broussa from where it spread into the neighbouring provinces. Many
viziers, pashas, agas and other government officials participated in the
movement which found support among the people and was not just
another rebellion of outlaws. Abaza Hasan aimed at establishing his
power in Asia Minor, and a rebel government was formed there.
Kopriilii had to be recalled from Transylvania where he was engaged in
the suppression of another, equally dangerous uprising. A large force was
dispatched against Abaza Hasan and succeeded in crushing the revolt
after heavy fighting. Many rebels were killed or executed. Thirty-one
heads were sent to Constantinople — among them those of Abaza Hasan,
four pashas and two viziers — to be publicly displayed.
Kopriilii was equally successful in the field of foreign policy. He dis-
patched the navy against the Venetians, who were still threatening the
Dardanelles, and after some initial failures they were forced to lift the
blockade which they had imposed. Then Kopriilii without delay under-
took to recapture the islands which had fallen into Venetian hands. He
himself directed the embarkation of the force sent to reconquer the island
of Tenedos which fell in August 1657; Lemnos followed in November.
Thus a great victory was gained : not only were the Dardanelles freed from
the Venetian threat, but the Ottoman navy regained its superiority in the
Aegean Sea so that it became possible to send reinforcements to Crete.
At the entrance to the Dardanelles two great castles, Seddiilbahr and
Kumkale, were built to protect the Straits against future attacks.
Even more important from Kopriilii’s point of view was the struggle
over Hungary and Transylvania — the key to central Europe and a bone of
contention between Ottoman and Habsburg since the days of Suleiman
the Magnificent. More than half of Hungary was under Turkish rule, and
the princes of Transylvania often sought the sultan’s consent and sanction
for the exercise of their government. For the maintenance of Ottoman
rule in Hungary and the securing of Turkish influence in Poland Tran-
sylvania was of supreme importance. The result of the decline of the
Ottoman Empire in the early seventeenth century was that its hold on
Transylvania became very loose. During the years of crisis at the begin-
ning of the reign of Mehmed IV Prince Gyorgy Rakoczi II attempted to
liberate his country from Turkish rule. 1 During the War of the North
(1655-60), when large parts of Poland were occupied by Sweden, R&koczi
aimed at seizing the Polish throne, 2 and equally at intervening in Moldavia
and Wallachia. As these projects were prejudicial to the interests of
Turkey, Kopriilii decided on intervention. He demanded the deposition
of Rakoczi and the election of another prince. In November 1657 Ferenc
Redei was duly elected, but two months later he was expelled from
Transylvania by Rakoczi ; Kopriilii then decided to lead an expedition
1 See above, ch. xx, pp. 487-8. ! See above, ch. xx, p. 486.
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into the principality. Before he left Constantinople he succeeded in
imposing firm discipline upon the Janissaries and many whom he dis-
trusted were executed. The Crimean Tatars and the Cossacks, who had
recently accepted Ottoman protection, joined the expedition, and a great
force was assembled. In spite of Rakoczi’s resistance the Turks were soon
in complete control of Transylvania. An agreement was concluded with
the new prince, Akos Barcsay, according to which the annual tribute was
to be increased from 15,000 to 40,000 florins and several fortresses were to
be occupied by Turkish garrisons. Rakoczi had to seek refuge in Habs-
burg territory and appealed to Leopold I as king of Hungary for support;
but he had to continue his struggle alone, was wounded in an engagement
in May 1660 and died a fortnight later. Yet his supporters in Transylvania
did not give up the fight. Early in 1661 they elected Janos Kemeny as
R&koczi’s successor and succeeded in kidnapping and killing Barcsay, his
pro-Turkish rival. As Koprulu in 1658 had had to return to Constantinople
to deal with the revolt in Asia Minor, Transylvania could not be brought
under control for many years. The Porte in its turn proclaimed Mihaly
Apafi prince of Transylvania, who disputed control of the country with
Kemeny. In 1662 the latter was killed in an encounter with Apafi who
then succeeded in bringing Transylvania under his control, and thus
Turkish suzerainty was restored. 1
Koprulu did not live to see the consummation of his policy in Transyl-
vania; in October 1661 he died, more than seventy-five years old. His
achievements indicate that the Ottoman Empire was capable of sur-
mounting great difficulties if competent men were employed in the offices
of State; but a regime of terror had to be established to obtain that end.
In the eyes of the contemporaries he was an ‘atrocious and ruthless man’
and not a great statesman, as later historians have argued. He was
particularly criticised for the killing of many innocent people and the
confiscation of the estates of the executed, not for the sake of reform of
the empire, but for that of enriching the Treasury. Yet it cannot be denied
that he halted the decline and that the power of the empire revived
rapidly. The sultan and his mother, Turhan, were especially pleased with
Kopriilti’s conduct of affairs which relieved them from the burdens of
government. Thus Mehmed IV could devote himself entirely to hunting
at Scutari or at Adrianople; or hunting parties were arranged for him in
the Balkans where more than 10,000 of his Christian subjects had to leave
their occupations and serve the royal pleasure as beaters or in some other
capacity. Vast numbers of pedigree hounds and falcons, often brought
from Russia, were provided for him. In accordance with Koprulii’s
advice, his son, Koprulu Fazil Ahmed Pasha, was appointed his successor
at the age of twenty-six; he remained in office from 1661 to 1676.
Fazil Ahmed was entirely different from his father. As a provincial
1 For further details, see above, ch. xx, pp. 488-9.
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governor he had acquired administrative experience. He was intelligent
and wise as well as a distinguished commander and clearly was one of the
great statesmen of the time. As Grand Vizier he did not adopt a policy of
terror and soon became popular on account of his fair methods of admini-
stration and his humane conduct; his modesty and politeness earned him
general respect. He refused to take bribes and through his good example
succeeded in curtailing corruption. He was opposed to religious fanati-
cism; Christians and Jews were well treated and protected from injustice.
In spite of many military expeditions the treasury was not short of money.
Owing to his administrative skill and his patronage of the arts the Otto-
man Empire experienced one of its golden eras : he was perhaps the most
successful Grand Vizier after Sokollu Mehmed Pasha who was in office
under three different sultans between 1565 and 1579.
In the field of foreign policy Fazil Ahmed’s greatest achievement was
the conquest of Candia which had been besieged by the Turks since 1647.
After a struggle lasting for more than twenty years the Venetians found it
impossible to withstand the large forces brought to Crete and surrendered
the fortress in 1669. 1 The conquest of Crete transformed the eastern
Mediterranean into a Turkish lake and considerably strengthened the
Ottoman Empire.
On land the Turkish forces were almost equally successful. The Habs-
burg intervention in Transylvania caused considerable tension between
the two empires. In order to maintain Turkish influence there Fazil
Ahmed with an army moved from Constantinople to Belgrade in the
spring of 1661. Thereupon the Austrians sent an envoy to Belgrade to
open negotiations. Fazil Ahmed demanded that the Austrians should
evacuate Transylvania, demolish their castles facing the fortress of
Kanisza, release all their Muslim prisoners and terminate all military
operations. When the Turkish forces reached the river Drava he in addi-
tion demanded the payment of the annual tribute of 30,000 florins which
the Habsburgs had paid in the time of Suleiman the Magnificent. When
they refused to comply the advance was resumed. In the summer of 1663
at the head of an army of 100,000 men the Grand Vizier marched through
Buda and laid siege to the fortress of Nove Zdmky (Neuhausel) in north-
western Hungary, which was under Habsburg rule. There was little
resistance. The Austrians were satisfied with a show of force — Monte-
cuccoli assembled 6000 men near Pressburg — and no succour was sent to
Neuhausel. The garrison defended the fortress with determination, but
when further resistance became impossible an agreement was reached in
September 1663 by which it was permitted to evacuate the fortress. After
this victory Fazil Ahmed returned to Belgrade to spend the winter there.
The revival of Turkish military strength and the threat this entailed for
Europe had important repercussions. The Imperial Diet at Ratisbon voted
1 For further details, see above, ch. xdc, pp. 462-3.
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unanimously in favour of granting the Habsburgs financial and military
aid. 1 Not only Spain, but even Louis XIV, contrary to his pro-Turkish
reputation, promised to send help, in spite of his recent quarrels with the
Habsburgs; and a French contingent of 6000 men was dispatched to
Hungary, as were those of many German princes. Under the auspices of
Pope Alexander VII a Holy League was formed against the Infidel.
Thanks to this aid the Austrians were able to take the offensive in the
spring of 1664. Montecuccoli reinforced the fortress of Raab (Gyor), an
important frontier post, to protect the Habsburg lands against a Turkish
advance. Fazil Ahmed crossed the Mur, occupied Zerinvar, and arrived
before the fortress of Komarom on the Danube, intending to occupy all
the castles which barred his advance on Vienna. This enterprise was
known to the Turks as Kyzyl Elma, the ‘Red Apple’, and became a
symbol of their political aspirations. In view of this threat the Austrians
decided to reach a peaceful settlement. Negotiations began at Vasvar at
the end of July : according to the terms agreed upon the Austrians were to
acquiesce in the Turkish occupation of Neuhausel and Nagyvdrad
(Grosswardein), to recognise Apafi as prince of Transylvania, which was
to be evacuated by both sides, to terminate all military activities, and to
present the sultan with a gift of 200,000 florins, while the latter would also
make a suitable gift to the Emperor. This treaty was to be valid for twenty
years (beginning in 1662), but until its ratification by both sides the Turks
retained their freedom of action, in order to force Leopold to agree
without delay. While the text was on its way to him for ratification Fazil
Ahmed crossed the Raab and advanced westwards up its left bank where
he encountered Montecuccoli’s army; if this force had been destroyed the
advance on Vienna could have been resumed and the capital might have
fallen. On 1 August 1664 the Turks attacked Montecuccoli’s army at
St Gotthard with superior forces, but made the mistake of not bringing
all their troops across the Raab. They were at first successful against the
Imperialists’ centre, but were finally repulsed and forced back to the river.
They lost about 5000 men and fifteen guns, but their enemies also suffered
heavy losses and Montecuccoli did not dare to follow the Turks across
the Raab, who then retreated to the Danube. The battle of St Gotthard
indicated the Austrian superiority in arms and tactics; it became obvious
that Turkish military strength was not as formidable as had been feared.
With the battle of St Gotthard hostilities came to an end, for in spite of
the victory Leopold ten days later confirmed the terms of the Treaty of
Vasvar which gave Neuhausel and Nagyvarad to Turkey and guaranteed
Turkish influence in Transylvania. 2 Only western and northern Hungary
was retained by the Habsburgs: there was as yet no indication of the
eastward spread of Habsburg power, and Fazil Ahmed was received in
Constantinople as a victorious general.
1 See above, ch. xvm, p. 446. 2 See above, ch. xx, p. 490.
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At this time Turkish influence also extended into the Ukraine. The
Cossack hetman Petr Dorosenko sought the protection of Mehmed IV
who undertook to defend it against both Poles and Russians and to pro-
tect it against the raids of the Crimean Tatars. After the armistice of Andru-
sovo, by which Poland and Russia temporarily settled their differences, 1
Dorosenko entered into even closer relations with Turkey, hoping to
conquer the Russian Ukraine with Turkish help, but the aid promised
proved insufficient. In 1672, however, a large Turkish army, supported
by the Khan of the Crimea and 15,000 Cossacks, marched into Poland,
conquered the fortress of Kamenec and advanced as far as Lwow. Yet a
treaty, by the terms of which Poland would have had to pay an annual
tribute to the Porte, was not ratified by the Polish diet ; neither was the
independence of Dorosenko recognised by Poland, nor did Podolia —
between the rivers Dnieper and Dniester — become a Turkish province.
In 1673 Sobieski’s victory of Chotin 2 — like that of St Gotthard nine years
before — revealed the military weakness of Turkey. Yet the Turks suc-
ceeded in reoccupying Chotin and in capturing other castles in Podolia.
By the terms of the peace of 1676 they retained the fortresses of Chotin
and Kamenec as well as Podolia, so that they were able to put pressure on
Poland and to oppose the seizure of the Ukraine by Russia. Ottoman
power was established to the north-west of the Black Sea, but a few
months later Fazil Ahmed died: Turkish domination between the Dnieper
and the Dniester only lasted for a few years.
Fazil Ahmed’s successor was Kara Mustafa Pasha, then forty-three
years old, who had been educated with his predecessor and had married
his sister, thus entering the Kopriilu family. He had held various posts
under both Kbpriiliis and during Fazil Ahmed’s campaigns he was
appointed deputy Grand Vizier. He was very ambitious and spiteful and
at times mean, making many enemies for himself, among whom were the
Chief Eunuch and the Marshal of the Imperial Stable. Continuing the
methods of his predecessor Kara Mustafa succeeded in maintaining
internal order and peace as well as the economy through his great
authority. But his real desire was the achievement of fame through
victory and conquest. The Turkish claims to the Ukraine were not main-
tained, although in 1678 he led an expedition thither which captured the
fortress of Chihirin, the capital of the Dorosenko Cossacks: the Turks
left it in ruins and withdrew. In 1681 a treaty was signed with Russia; the
Turks renounced their claim to the Ukraine, which they considered of little
value, and the campaigns for which had brought them little satisfaction.
Kiev and the left bank of the Dnieper remained Russian, and Podolia and
the right bank (with the exception of Kiev) soon became Polish, while the
Turks withdrew from this contested area. The problem which began to
1 See below, ch. xxiv, pp. 568-9; ch. xxv, pp. 575-6.
2 See below, ch. xxrv, p. 569.
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attract all the attention of Kara Mustafa was the advance westwards, the
‘Red Apple’, the conquest of Vienna.
The Treaty of Vasvar of 1664 was valid until 1682, but the struggle for
influence in Hungary and Transylvania was continuing. The Magyars of
Hungary were reluctant to submit to Austrian rule, and the Protestants of
the area feared the Catholicism of the Habsburgs — factors which played
into Turkish hands. As the Hungarians under Turkish rule were allowed
religious toleration, the Protestant Hungarians were hoping for Turkish
support in their fight against the Catholic Habsburgs. The Hungarian
leader, Imre Thokoly, sent an envoy to Constantinople who was to seek
Ottoman protection, but this request was at first refused by Kara Mustafa.
Yet in 1682 he recognised Thokoly as king of western Hungary and pro-
mised him help in case of need, and a small Turkish force actually went to
his aid. With its support Thokoly attacked and captured two Austrian
fortresses. To avert this new threat to their territory the Austrians sent an
envoy. Count Albert de Caprara, to Constantinople to renew the Treaty
of Vasvar which was due to expire in August 1682. His proposals, how-
ever, were rejected by Kara Mustafa who was bent on war: he was only
willing to abide by its stipulations if the Austrians surrendered the
fortress of Gyor and refunded the expenses the Porte had made in prepara-
tion for war. In order to reinforce his threats he persuaded Mehmed IV
to spend the winter with the Janissaries at Adrianople, whither the Austrian
representatives repaired to continue the negotiations. But the Turkish
attitude remained uncompromising. The commander of the Janissaries
once more demanded the surrender of Gyor, whereupon the Austrian
envoy replied: ‘a castle may be taken by force of arms, but not by force
of words’. Thus war became inevitable. The sultan himself led his army as
far as Belgrade whence Kara Mustafa led it into Hungary. The most
important campaign in Turkish history had begun.
The number of Kara Mustafa’s army is not exactly known. Together
with a maintenance force of 150,000 it has been estimated at about 500,000,
but some chroniclers give the figure of 200,000. According to Silahdar
Mehmed Aga, the Ottoman historian, the engineer and artillery units alone
had 60,000 men. The Crimean Tatars mustered 40,000 to 50,000 horsemen.
But all these figures have to be treated with caution and the real numbers
were probably much smaller. The fighting units were accompanied by
many artisans and tradesmen and a great number of pack-animals, so that
the army appeared larger than it actually was. According to the Turkish
sources the plan was to conquer the fortresses of Gyor and Komarom
and not to march on Vienna, and some Ottoman historians have asserted
that Mehmed IV was not aware of the intention to extend the campaign
as far as Vienna. It has also been asserted that it was the Foreign Sec-
retary, Mustafa Effendi, who was aware of Kara Mustafa’s thirst for
glory and fame and urged him to undertake the expedition. Yet it seems
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very unlikely that the capture of the two fortresses would have satisfied
the Grand Vizier while such a large army was available, and it seems
much more likely that he intended from the outset to march on Vienna.
Probably the intervention of the Foreign Secretary was adduced later as
proof that Kara Mustafa was not alone responsible for the failure. What
he did was simply to make use of the might of Turkey which had re-
emerged as a great military power under the two Koprulus. But in order
to keep his strategic plan secret the name of Vienna was not mentioned
and the targets announced were the fortresses of Gyor and Komarom.
It was indeed of the greatest importance to reduce all enemy garrisons
barring the way to Vienna before attempting an assault on the capital.
Muradgerey, the Khan of the Crimea, criticised Kara Mustafa for
advancing on Vienna before Gyor and Komarom were taken, but thus
made himself the Grand Vizier’s enemy. Ibrahim Pasha, the aged com-
mander of Buda, suggested that the two fortresses should be reduced now
and that in the following spring the moment would have come to attack
Vienna. Kara Mustafa, however, was irritated by these suggestions and —
arguing that after the fall of Vienna ‘all the Christians would obey the
Ottomans ’ — gave the orders for an attack on the capital.
Before the declaration of war by the Porte the Austrians did not con-
sider a siege of their capital likely, but believed that Kara Mustafa would
engage in military activities in Hungary. Only when war was imminent
did the Habsburgs call on the other European powers for help. Yet the
situation in Europe was not propitious for this purpose. Louis XIV, in
particular, did not conceal his hostility to the Habsburgs; if the Austrian
armies were defeated by the Turks this would enable him to become the
champion of Christendom and after an overwhelming success to win the
Imperial Crown. The attitude of Frederick William, the Elector of Bran-
denburg, who was the close ally of Louis XIV, was equally doubtful. But
Max Emanuel, the Elector of Bavaria, and John George III, the Elector
of Saxony, promised to send help. Pope Innocent XI, as the head of the
Catholic Church, made strenuous efforts to provide aid for the Habsburgs.
He appealed to the sovereigns of many Christian countries and sent large
sums of money to Leopold I. Following his appeal many Italian cities
contributed, as did Portugal. The most effective aid, however, came from
John Sobieski of Poland, who had fought the Turks successfully in the
past. 1 On 31 March 1683 Austria and Poland signed a defensive and
offensive alliance; if Austria were attacked Sobieski promised to come to
her aid with 40,000 men. Austria’s own military strength was insufficient
to withstand the Turkish invasion, for after the Peace of Nymegen (1679)
she kept only 30,000 men under arms; General Montecuccoli, the victor
of St Gotthard, died in 1681, and his successor, Duke Charles of Lorraine,
the brother-in-law of Leopold I, was not of the same calibre.
* See below, ch. xxiv, p. 569.
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The Ottoman army advanced up the right bank of the Danube, reached
Stuhlweissenburg (Szekesfehdrvar) and crossed the Raab on ten bridges,
which were constructed on the spot, without encountering any resistance.
Only a small force was left behind as a pretence of laying siege to Gy6r.
When the Turks crossed the Raab Leopold I left Vienna with his family
and court and fled to Passau, while Charles of Lorraine retreated with his
forces from the vicinity of Nove Zamky, which he had intended to besiege,
to Linz higher up the Danube. After a week’s march the Turkish army
approached Vienna and began to surround it. Its walls enclosed the Burg,
and, by the standards of the seventeenth century, the fortress was easy
to defend and difficult to conquer. But when the Turks appeared the
defence measures were far from complete and there were only 12,000 to
13,000 soldiers within the walls of Vienna. Its defence was entrusted to
Count Rudiger von Starhemberg, the governor, who, together with the
mayor, Andreas Limberg, played a prominent part in the operations. It
may be that the Turks, if they had advanced quickly from Gy6r, could
have taken Vienna by storm; but the army moved very slowly and only
arrived before Vienna on 14 July; three days later the town was com-
pletely surrounded. The Turkish camp was pitched to the west of Vienna,
between Grinzing and Schonbrunn: with its 25,000 tents it looked like a
large town. The tents, the 50,000 carts and the pack-animals— mules,
camels and buffaloes — made it appear extremely crowded.
The Turkish batteries were placed in position on the evening of 14 July
in preparation for an attack on the following day. Before it began,
according to custom, a message in Turkish and Latin was shot by arrow
into the town demanding its surrender and the conversion of the citizens
to Islam. If they refused but consented to abandon Vienna, a safe-conduct
was guaranteed to every inhabitant. Count Starhemberg, however, sent
no reply to this proposal. Therefore the Turkish artillery opened fire — •
154 years after the first siege of Vienna by Suleiman the Magnificent.
Then the Turks had possessed no heavy guns, and this mistake was
repeated in 1683. According to Silahdar Mehmed Aga, who took part in
the campaign, the Turks had only nineteen small guns, some howitzers
and 120 guns of medium calibre. But the heaviest Turkish gun, the
Balyemez, was not used. This lack of heavy guns may be attributed to the
fact that the avowed target of the campaign was only the capture of the
fortresses of Gyor and Kom&rom. The Viennese, on the other hand, were
superior in artillery, both in quality and quantity, and this fact was to play
a decisive part in the defence. The Turks intended to make up for this
deficiency by mining the walls and bastions and thus opening breaches for
an assault. This they had done successfully at Chihirin five years before; but
the walls of Vienna were much more solid and its defenders much more
courageous, determined, and better disciplined than those of the Cossack
capital. The garrison did not adopt merely static defensive tactics but
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made sorties which caused heavy losses among the Turks. The long dura-
tion of the siege caused dissatisfaction among them; since many had
already collected enough booty they wished to return home as soon as
possible. During the siege the Crimean Tatars penetrated westwards to
the vicinity of Krems and Stein and as far as the frontiers of Bavaria, their
raids causing panic among the people. If Kara Mustafa had attacked
with all his strength Vienna might have been taken; but he feared that, if
the city fell as the result of attack, there would be no booty left on account
of the soldiers’ plundering. His greatest mistake, however, was his
disregard of the forces sent to relieve Vienna.
Since the beginning of the siege the allies of the Habsburgs doubled
their efforts to send help, and Charles of Lorraine awaited reinforcements
from Poland and Bavaria. He was in continuous contact with the
beleaguered city and was successful in opposing the Tatar raids towards
the west and in preventing the capture of Pressburg by Thokoly. Thus
John Sobieski succeeded in joining the Austrian forces without encoun-
tering any resistance. The two commanders met at Hollabrunn to the
north of Vienna, where the Bavarian and Saxon contingents also joined
them. Although Sobieski led only 20,000 men into the allied camp, the
command of the army which numbered some 70,000 in all was left to him
because of his royal rank. But the strategical planning was in the hands of
Charles of Lorraine and his soldiers had to bear the brunt of the fighting.
News of the advance of the allied army reached the Turkish camp on
4 September. It would have been possible to try to prevent it from
crossing the Danube, and allegedly Kara Mustafa ordered the Khan of the
Crimea to do so, but the latter, out of animosity towards the Grand Vizier,
permitted the enemy to cross safely to the right bank. In fact, however,
the Khan could not achieve much against an army which possessed
artillery, and Kara Mustafa committed a grave mistake in not himself
commanding this operation and in not using more troops and artillery
for it. After the catastrophe the Turkish chroniclers used the Khan as a
scapegoat. Before the arrival of the allied army Vienna was living through
its most critical days, for early in September the Turks succeeded in the
mining of some bastions, in opening several breaches in the walls and in
forcing their way to the inner precincts of the Burg, so that the fall of the
city seemed imminent. Count Starhemberg urgently demanded aid, but
would hardly have been able to withstand a major assault. Yet before any
materialised the desperate Viennese were informed of the arrival of the
allied army by bonfires lit on the slopes of the Kahlenberg. From there
the allies launched their attack on 1 2 September. Kara Mustafa thought
that cavalry would be sufficient to repulse it — in contrast with the Khan
of the Crimea who advised him to use the Janissaries for a counter-attack
on the allies. These proved far superior in every respect: they chose an
eminently suitable terrain for their attack, their artillery and manoeuvres
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were perfect, and their fighting morale was very high, since the deliverance
of Vienna was deemed a holy duty. By the evening the Turkish forces
were defeated and the Polish cavalry entered the Ottoman camp. Then the
Turks began to flee towards Gyor, but the allies did not pursue them
because they believed that this speedy retreat was a ruse. The Turks
suffered more than 10,000 casualties — against about 5000 or fewer of the
Christians — and lost their whole camp with its treasure and provisions.
The result of this Turkish catastrophe was the occupation of Hungary
by the Habsburgs. As early as mid-October the Austrians captured Gran
(Esztergom), the first of many Turkish fortresses that were to fall into
their hands. Kara Mustafa eventually reorganised his panic-stricken
forces, but was unable to stop the Austrian advance into Hungary. He
therefore returned to Belgrade, intending to spend the winter there and to
start a new offensive in the following spring; but his harsh measures had
created many enemies. The Chief Eunuch and the Marshal of the Sultan’s
Stables persuaded Mehmed IV to sanction the execution of the Grand
Vizier, who was strangled in Belgrade on 25 December 1683. Yet his
execution was a loss to Turkey, for he alone would have been capable of
taking revenge on the enemy, as was admitted by many of the pashas in
spite of their intense dislike of Kara Mustafa. Mehmed IV, however, had
no longer the peace of mind to go hunting. He asserted that Kara Mustafa
had failed to ask his permission for laying siege to Vienna and made him
personally responsible for the defeat; but none of the later Grand Viziers
possessed his ability.
The situation of the Ottoman Empire was indeed alarming. The
Austrians drove the Turks out of Hungary, and the Venetians occupied
the coast of Dalmatia and even the Morea. 1 But Mehmed IV did not
change his mode of life. The people were saying that the country was lost
but that he never sacrificed his hunting: if he took no account of the
people, did he not fear God? Meanwhile Mehmed, while hunting at
Davud Pasha near Constantinople, invited a certain Sheikh to deliver a
sermon at the local mosque, but the latter declined, for in his opinion he
could only preach on the necessity of the sultan’s giving up hunting and
occupying himself with the affairs of the State. The clergy then took up
the case, the Grand Mufti, Ali Effendi, putting himself at the head of
the movement. Thereupon Mehmed IV dismissed him and appointed
Mehmed Effendi as his successor ; but the new Grand Mufti warned the
sultan that there would be an uprising if he did not give up hunting. This
Mehmed did for one month, but felt so desperate and had so many sleep-
less nights that he announced his intention of hunting again within the
neighbourhood of Davud Pasha. Then the army, blaming him for all the
setbacks which the empire had suffered, joined the opposition. When the
sultan was faced with this critical situation he promised that he would
1 For these events see volume vi, chapter xix.
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never hunt again, dissolved all the hunting establishments, distributed his
hounds, sold his horses, and undertook to observe the maximum eco-
nomy in all his expenditure in future. Several hundred women were
released from the harem. But it was too late. The mutinous army marched
on Constantinople and deposed the sultan on 9 November 1687. He spent
the rest of his life as a prisoner in the ‘cage’, to die five years later. He
was succeeded by his younger brother, Suleiman II, who had been
imprisoned since September 1651 when his grandmother had wanted to
put him on the throne in place of Mehmed.
With the close of Mehmed’s reign Turkey ceased to be a threat to
Europe, and the Christian powers assumed the offensive. 1 The military
reforms in the European armies and the battle of St Gotthard indicated
the changes which had taken place. It was indeed fortunate for Turkey
that the European powers did not realise their superiority until the
catastrophe before Vienna, a superiority caused by the scientific and
technological advances of western Europe. The two Kopriiliis, for all
their successful administration, only put the out-of-date institutions of
the Ottoman Empire into working order. They deserve credit for trans-
forming a declining empire into a great power reminiscent of the days of
Suleiman the Magnificent. But with the mistakes of Kara Mustafa the
tide of decline returned: the main objective of his campaigns was the
gaining of booty and prestige, and not the annihilation of the forces that
threatened the security of the Ottoman Empire, but in doing this he
merely revived its classical policy. The exit from the Ukraine and the
failure of the ambitious siege of Vienna made the decline of Turkey
obvious ; but much more so did the great victories of Prince Eugene at the
beginning of the eighteenth century.
1 See vol. vi, ch. xix.
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SCANDINAVIA AND THE BALTIC
T he Peace of Westphalia considerably strengthened Sweden’s
position in Scandinavia and the Baltic. To the earlier conquests in
the east — Ingria, Estonia and Livonia — were added western
Pomerania, Bremen, Verden and Wismar in the Empire; the total popula-
tion amounted to about 2,500,000 people, half of whom were Swedish. The
peace did not, however, solve Sweden’s problems at home and abroad,
but created fresh problems. The new German provinces made Sweden a
member of the Empire and she became more deeply involved in the
intrigues and negotiations between the princes and the Emperor. More-
over, the new provinces were coveted by others. Brandenburg remained
discontented because she failed to gain western Pomerania. Denmark and
the Ltineburg princes wanted Bremen and Verden. In the east the fear
persisted that Russia — after the ‘Time of Troubles’ — would renew her
attempts to break through to the Baltic.
Furthermore, Swedish successes in the Thirty Years War had not
terminated the struggle for hegemony in the north between Sweden and
Denmark, which dated from the fourteenth century. By the Peace of
Bromsebro (1645) Denmark ceded to Sweden freedom from customs dues
in the Sound as well as the Baltic islands of Gotland and Osel, Jamtland,
Harjedalen and Halland (the latter for thirty years). The gains of 1648
also meant that Sweden could attack Denmark from the south; but even
so Denmark still constituted the greatest threat to Sweden’s position.
Denmark was eager to reconquer the provinces lost in 1645 and — since
the struggle was fundamentally one over hegemony in the north — she
necessarily considered it a fight for existence. Thus the Scandinavian
countries, during the whole period to the outbreak of the Great Northern
War in 1700, attempted to isolate each other by concluding alliances with
each other’s enemies among the European powers.
The struggle for hegemony in the north was closely linked with the
Swedish aim of gaining the dominium maris Baltici, the command of the
Baltic, considered necessary for Sweden’s continuation as a great power.
The prerequisites of Swedish naval supremacy in the Baltic were the com-
mand of the Baltic ports and the conversion of the Baltic into a mare
clausum, by denying the western fleets access to it. This could be effected
either by a complete defeat of Denmark, which would give Sweden com-
mand of the Sound and the Belts, or by collaboration with Denmark. In
either case the interests of other powers had to be taken into account.
English and Dutch trading interests were engaged to such an extent that
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neither power could tolerate its fleet being shut out of the Baltic, nor
the domination of that sea by either Sweden or Denmark. This was a
salient factor in Baltic diplomacy during the second half of the seventeenth
century.
Sweden’s struggle to achieve command of the Baltic had important
economic aspects. In harmony with the mercantilist ideas of the time it was
stressed that without commerce this command was ‘ dead and wasted Axel
Oxenstierna’s instructions for the newly established Board of Commerce
of 1651 give the clearest indications of these hopes. The Chancellor
visualised the Swedish ports along the Baltic as import and export centres
for large parts of Europe. By controlling the export of com and naval
stores from the Baltic to western Europe the revenue of the Swedish
Crown would, it was hoped, increase manifold through customs and excises.
The issue of the command of the Baltic was inextricably linked with the
problem of defence and the domestic problems confronting Sweden after
the long wars. The defence of the scattered conquests, threatened by
neighbours bent on revenge, demanded a fleet with command of the
Baltic, as well as an army ready at all times and fortresses furnished with
garrisons strong enough to contain an initial attack by the armed forces of
any of the neighbours. The income of the Swedish Crown did not suffice
to maintain so strong a defence. The solution advocated by Oxenstiema
and the majority of the Swedish nobility was that the new trans-Baltic
provinces should pay for their own defence through the customs whose
yield would increase with the growth of trade. There was much wishful
thinking in this plan whose realisation would in any case require time;
and a dominium maris Baltici, as far as trade was concerned, was an illu-
sion. It is true that some 40 per cent of the ships which passed through the
Sound from the Baltic had loaded their cargoes in Swedish ports, while
some 35 per cent came from Polish ports — Sweden’s closest competitors;
but 65 per cent of all ships passing through the Sound in the middle of the
seventeenth century sailed under the Dutch and only 10 per cent under the
Swedish flag.
Therefore the increased demands for Sweden’s defence must, as before,
be met from taxation. During the long war, however, the revenue from
taxation had declined catastrophically. The Crown lands as well as the
taxes due from the landowning peasants had passed into the hands of the
nobility, especially the high nobility, for the recruiting of regiments or in
lieu of unpaid salaries. This applied especially to the newly conquered
provinces ; but even in Sweden and Finland the loss of Crown land reached
such proportions that in the year 1655 two-thirds of all farms were
reckoned to be in the hands of the nobility. Since the nobility, because of
its privileges, enjoyed tax-exemption, taxes were paid from every third
farm only, and the resulting deficit had to be covered by extraordinary
contributions formally voted by the Estates during a session of the diet.
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Dissatisfaction with the constantly recurring contributions and the
demand for fresh recruits for the army increased amongst the clergy,
burghers and peasants, and also among the lower nobility who looked
with resentment at the large estates of the high aristocracy. When, after
the peace of 1648, the pressure of taxation increased further discontent
became vocal. Against the Crown’s request for supply the lower Estates
demanded a resumption of Crown lands, a reduktion of the great dona-
tions and fiefs. It was argued that the fruits of Sweden’s great victories
must not be confined to a few noble families while the nation as a whole
grew poorer. The struggle over this issue, which had begun earlier, grew
ever more intense in the years 1648-55.
The differences between the Estates were exploited by Queen Christina
(1632-54) who had decided to abdicate because of her conversion to
Catholicism, for it was unthinkable that a Catholic should sit on the
throne of Gustavus Adolphus. When the queen wanted to secure the suc-
cession in the person of her cousin Charles Gustavus, she was opposed by
the Council, led by Axel Oxenstierna, since the high nobility wanted to use
this opportunity to increase its own power. Through a skilful use of the
dissensions among the Estates the queen succeeded in having Charles
Gustavus declared her heir after her death; then, at the remarkable diet of
1650, where the struggle between the Estates reached its climax, she forced
the Council and the nobility— threatening to approve the demand for
a resumption of Crown lands — to recognise Charles Gustavus uncondi-
tionally as heir to the throne. In 1654 she solemnly relinquished the
Crown and left Sweden.
Charles X (1654-60) came from the House of Palatinate-Zweibriicken.
His brief reign was dominated by an expansionist foreign policy, partly
due to his military profession: he had been the commander-in-chief of the
Swedish forces in the last decade of the Thirty Years War. Other circum-
stances also forced Sweden into a new war. Russian successes against
Poland were so sweeping that Poland’s disintegration seemed imminent. 1
It was a matter of life and death for Sweden that the west-Prussian har-
bours, particularly Danzig, should not become Russian, but Swedish.
Finally, one way of solving the problem of supporting the forces necessary
for defence was by waging war abroad, where they could live off" enemy
resources. The war in Poland (1655-7), which began with Swedish attacks
from Livonia and Pomerania, initially brought great successes to Charles X.
In alliance with Frederick William of Brandenburg he defeated the Polish
army in the famous ‘three-day battle’ at Warsaw; but neither this battle
nor the long marches across Polish territory proved decisive. As the war
progressed, Charles learnt how concerned other European States were
with a proper balance of power in this area. Brandenburg demanded
increased compensation for her collaboration in the Polish campaign and
1 See below, ch. xxiv, p. 566, and ch. xxv, p. 574.
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finally went over to Poland. The Dutch, who were determined to deny
Sweden the west-Prussian harbours, moved closer to Sweden’s enemies.
The Emperor Leopold intervened on the side of Poland, and Russia pro-
ceeded from defence to attack. In the summer of 1657 Denmark declared
war on Sweden, hoping to use the situation to reconquer the territories
lost in 1645.
The ensuing war proved that the military situation had changed deci-
sively in Sweden’s favour through her possessions in the Empire. Her
position had been further strengthened by Charles’s marriage to Hedvig
Eleonora of Holstein-Gottorp, which became the foundation of an alli-
ance, destined to last into the eighteenth century, and the corner-stone of
Swedish policy towards Denmark. Conversely, this alliance made it a
matter of life and death for Denmark to free herself from an encirclement
by Sweden and Holstein-Gottorp. At the news of the Danish declaration
of war, Charles hurried by forced marches from Poland to Holstein and
then conquered the whole Jutland peninsula. With the onset of winter,
however, the situation became critical because the fleet could not transport
the Swedish army to the Danish islands, while Charles’s enemies prepared
to attack him from Germany. One of the boldest exploits in Scandinavian
military history — the marching of the whole Swedish army across the
frozen Great and Little Belts — decided the issue. The Danes were taken
completely by surprise. Faced with the threat of an attack on defenceless
Copenhagen, they speedily agreed to peace negotiations and made peace at
Roskilde in February 1658.
This peace, only slightly modified by the Peace of Copenhagen of 1660,
became decisive for the domestic and external developments of Scandi-
navia. The whole eastern part of the Danish State, Scania, Halland and
Blekinge, and the Norwegian province of Bohuslan were permanently
ceded to Sweden. Thus the main entry to the Baltic, the Sound, became
the border between Sweden and Denmark and the Danes were no
longer entitled to demand tolls in the Sound. Sweden realised her old
dream of gaining a coastline which gave her direct access to the North
Sea, a victory of great importance, especially for Swedish trade; but fear
of Danish revenge remained, as did fear of popular risings in the former
Danish provinces in case of a Danish attack on Sweden.
For Denmark, the loss of her eastern provinces had consequences
beyond the economic ones, since the war with Sweden led to radical con-
stitutional changes. The position of the Danish nobility, and their influ-
ence on government and administration, was even stronger than in
Sweden. Their power was based partly on the great noble estates (about
half of Denmark’s soil belonged to some 150 noble families) and partly on
their customary control of local administration. On their estates the
Danish nobility enjoyed even greater privileges than their Swedish
counterparts, for example, a wider freedom from taxation for their
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tenants. This, together with the unlimited labour services of the peasants
(the institution of hoveri), facilitated the growth of demesne farming. The
Danish nobility, receiving preference in official appointments, also
dominated the entire administration. The Council, which consisted of
representatives of the highest noble families, exercised the decisive influ-
ence at the expense of the Estates (nobility, clergy, burghers). The pro-
vincial governors, all members of the nobility, controlled the collection of
taxes. In Norway, where there were few noblemen, the peasants had
maintained their traditionally independent position ; but the country was
at times governed rather insensitively by the central government in
Copenhagen.
After the death of Christian IV in 1648 a struggle lasting several months
broke out between the heir, Frederick III (1648-70), and the Council. As
the price of his election by the diet the new king had to sign a compre-
hensive privilege which guaranteed to the Council and the nobility that
economic and political influence which they had gradually acquired with-
out legal foundation. The king’s declaration was meant to inaugurate a
long period of uncontested noble government; but soon after its signature
friction arose not only between the king and the nobility, but also among
the leaders of the nobility. The Grand Marshal, Korfitz Ulfeldt, was
accused of peculation, joined Charles X and accompanied him as an
adviser during his Danish campaigns. Throughout the period the financial
difficulties of the Danish Crown increased. Extensive alienations of
Crown land gave temporary relief, but in the long run made the situation
worse. The heavy taxation caused discontent among the lower Estates,
which in the first place was directed against the privileged nobility and its
control of the government.
Charles’s triumphant campaign against Denmark in 1657-8 and the
hard peace terms exposed the inability of the nobility to provide peace
and security. Frederick III and the burghers, on the other hand, showed
courage and heroism at the siege of Copenhagen, thus preparing the
ground for change. When the Estates met in Copenhagen in the autumn of
1660 the revenue had been reduced to a fraction of the peacetime level,
while the national debt amounted to nearly 5 million Danish daler. The
hostility between the Estates came into the open when the Council sug-
gested an excise on certain goods; for while the clergy and burghers
championed the principle of equality and demanded that everybody
should pay the new tax, the nobility claimed exemption not only for them-
selves but also for some of their tenants. The determination of the two
lower Estates forced the nobility to retreat step by step and further
demands for reform were raised, for example, for a change in the system
of administration which left the provincial governors too free from royal
control.
While these reforms were discussed, a proposal to declare Frederick HI
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hereditary king of Denmark was put forward. Although the details are
not known, it is certain that the initiative came from an inner court circle.
Its leader, Christoffer Gabel, penned the anonymous proposition for the
introduction of hereditary kingship, apparently after consultation with
the leader of the clergy, Bishop Hans Svane, and the mayor of Copen-
hagen, Hans Nansen, the spokesman of the burghers; the king was a
passive observer. Clergy and burghers were persuaded to petition the
Council for a change in the constitution. When the Council refused to
debate this and the nobility remained silent, Frederick III declared that he
would allow himself to be proclaimed hereditary king against the will of
the Council and the nobility. The gates of Copenhagen were closed and
the wartime burgher militia was called out. These moves weakened the
opposition and all three Estates granted Frederick the hereditary govern-
ment. This change did not immediately lead to the establishment of
absolutism. A committee was formed to submit proposals for a new con-
stitution and the diet, at the suggestion of this committee, agreed to
return to Frederick the privilege which he had granted at his accession
and to ask him to draft a new constitution ; thus power was put into his
hands. The king took a further step when he let himself be proclaimed
‘sovereign king’. By 1665 the new constitution was complete and promul-
gated as the ‘ King’s Law ’. Its ideological foundation lay in the principles
of natural law: power had been transferred to the king through a treaty
of the Estates with the ruler.
The introduction of absolutism was accompanied by drastic changes in
the central and local administration. The driving force behind the reforms
was the Grand Treasurer Hannibal Sehested, who was impressed by the
collegiate form of administration introduced in Sweden in 1634. He
organised the different branches of the central administration into col-
leges with presidents and a fixed number of assessors. With the introduc-
tion of absolutism and collegiate administration the Council of the high
nobility ceased to function. It was resurrected in a new form during the
early years of the reign of Christian V (1670-99), when Peder Griffenfeldt
introduced a privy council ( Gehejmeraad) on the French model. In the
realm of local administration the old len (fief) divisions were in 1662 trans-
formed into amt (local district) divisions, administered by amtmenn
instead of lensmenn, whose powers were severely curtailed ; for while the
old provincial governors had combined civil and military authority, the
amtmenn were purely civil administrators. Even there their powers were
circumscribed, since the collection of taxes was transferred to separate
officials, the amt-secretaries. Effective central control of the local admini-
stration, hitherto lacking, was now established.
This reorganisation was closely connected with financial reforms which
were initiated by Sehested after 1660. The problem was to reduce the
national debt while retaining sufficient forces for defence. The debt con-
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sisted, above all, of loans contracted during the war, of unpaid salaries,
and of payments due to army contractors from the war. Sehested em-
ployed methods used earlier, though never on such a scale: he ceded
Crown lands to mortgagees and other creditors, corresponding to a sum
roughly equalling the national debt. So much land was alienated that the
Crown was forced to look for other sources of revenue. It was also
realised that the customary taxes burdened the peasants too heavily, while
the nobility were exempt. The noble privileges in respect of existing taxes
could not be altered, since the king at the introduction of absolutism in
1660 had promised to maintain them. To provide a basis for new taxation
a land survey of all Denmark, the so-called matrikulering, was undertaken
in the early 1660’s, which was superseded by a new, vastly improved
survey in 1688. In accordance with this a general land-tax for towns and
country alike was introduced, which brought to the Crown a much
higher revenue than that formerly derived from Crown lands. Thus
Denmark’s financial dilemma was in the main solved by increased taxa-
tion of land or, alternatively expressed, through a change from a revenue
based on a natural economy to one based on money.
The men who introduced absolutism in Denmark carried out reforms
with enthusiasm in many fields. The work on the new constitution
awakened interest in civil law. There had never been one common law for
the whole State, the medieval laws of the different parts forming the basis
of the legal system. In 1661 a commission began to draft a new civil law;
several others followed, and in 1683 the ‘Danish Law’ was completed. In
the economic sphere these men represented the ideas of mercantilism.
They tried to loosen the ties which restricted trade and crafts. They
subsidised the establishment of factories and workshops. Their initiative
produced some results, particularly in Copenhagen, which grew to a town
of over 60,000 by the end of the seventeenth century. The growth of trade
and industry, however, should not be exaggerated; for the export of com
and oxen, which was very important, declined and could not be compen-
sated for by the rise of Copenhagen. A favourable balance of trade
resulted from increased exports of timber and fish from Norway.
Interest has concentrated on the changes affecting the agrarian classes,
nobility and peasants alike, and their relationship. The old nobility
remained important though it lost its political power. Even when the len
was changed to an amt , the new officials came at first mainly from the old
families. These posts were, however, not as lucrative as they had been.
Some members of the high nobility remained in the central administration,
though most noblemen preferred to leave the capital and live on their
estates. The nobility retained its economic and social privileges, but the
former were made illusory by the new taxes based on the matrikulering.
The trend was clearly towards a decline of the old nobility, both in
influence and income.
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Alongside the old nobility, and partially replacing it, a new nobility
developed, partly a service nobility, partly a landowning nobility. It con-
sisted mainly of immigrant Germans. The introduction of absolutism did
not, as was the case in Sweden, mean a transfer of land from the nobility
to the Crown and the peasants. On the contrary, the new Danish nobility
became partly a landowning nobility at the expense of the Crown through
the alienation of Crown lands mentioned above. By 1688 there were in
Denmark 58,000 farms. Of these only just over 1000 were farmed by
peasant proprietors. The Crown possessed 25 per cent of the land, but
two-thirds belonged to noble or burgher landlords, and the remainder to
the university, the Church and schools.
Parallel with this development went a change in agricultural methods;
for the production of oxen for export became less profitable than the
cultivation of corn and, to some extent, than the more recent dairy
farming. As a result old farms and villages were abandoned; large estates
appeared, corresponding to forty average farms, and cultivated as a single
unit. The condition of the peasants deteriorated and the landowning
peasantry virtually disappeared. The Crown’s need of more money
meant increased pressure of taxation, which fell most heavily on the
peasants. Tenants received worse conditions from their new lords. The
change to big-estate farming demanded more labour on the demesnes.
The Germans among the new nobility introduced into Denmark the
harsher treatment of the peasants customary in northern Germany. The
burghers who owned estates were usually absentee landlords, and super-
vision was exercised by bailiffs who in their own interest squeezed the
peasants. Similar conditions obtained on many noble estates. Some
attempts were made to improve matters, but the reformers, in accordance
with their mercantilist principles, had no interest in improving the
peasants’ lot.
In Sweden, at this time, there occurred a movement in the opposite
direction — though less sweeping. Charles X died at the beginning of 1660.
On his death-bed he dictated his will, arranging the government of the
country during the regency, which was inevitable since his heir, Charles XI
(1660-97), was only four years old. The government was entrusted to the
Queen Mother, Hedvig Eleonora, and five high State officials. As some
of the five offices had been left vacant, Charles X appointed persons who
could be expected to safeguard the interests of the dynasty as against those
of the high nobility ; among them was Charles X’s brother, Duke Adolphus
John, and Herman Fleming, the leading spirit behind the partial resump-
tion of Crown lands decreed in 1655, which had been largely ineffective
because of the war. As early as the autumn of 1 660, however, the nobility
prevailed upon the other Estates to have Charles X’s will declared invalid.
The five high officials were forced to resign and make place for others
more amenable to the aristocracy. The Council, composed exclusively of
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members of the high nobility, increased its influence. In foreign policy
leadership devolved on the Chancellor, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie.
In domestic affairs the Treasurer, Gustav Bonde, urged a programme of
strict economy ; but the central aim of the new government was to preserve
the landed wealth of the nobility.
The most urgent task was to put an end to the war inherited from
Charles X. The peace with Denmark-Norway has already been mentioned.
With Poland peace was concluded at Oliva in 1660, on the status quo
principle as far as territory was concerned. The Polish royal House finally
relinquished its claims to the Swedish Crown which it had maintained
since the time of Sigismund Vasa. A Swedish-Russian peace was con-
cluded at Kardis in 1661, again without territorial changes. These three
peace treaties marked the zenith of Swedish power in the Baltic. The com-
plete domination of the Baltic and of Scandinavia, which had been the
aim of Charles X and others, was not achieved ; the various parts of the
Swedish empire had not been linked up territorially, nor had the empire
been stabilised. The danger remained that Russia might break through to
the Baltic, either across the Swedish barrier on the Baltic littoral or across
Poland. There were several German States, especially the dynamic Bran-
denburg, eager to wrest from Sweden her German provinces. But Danish
plans for revenge constituted the most serious threat; yet the regency
government considered a Danish attack on Sweden unlikely, because of
the changes in Danish foreign policy after the introduction of absolutism.
Denmark’s traditional foreign policy up to 1660 had rested on alliances
with the Emperor, Poland and the United Provinces. This was natural,
because her main rival, Sweden, since the Thirty Years War had tied
herself to France, the chief opponent of the Habsburgs. During Sehested’s
period of power a reorientation took place which meant that Sweden, in
the short run, had nothing to fear from Denmark. In his efforts at
financial economy Sehested reduced the standing army, a move which
provoked strong opposition from the officer corps. Denmark had been
disappointed at the lack of help from her allies during the war and, no less
than Sweden, suffered from Dutch trade dominance in the Baltic. There-
fore, Sehested began to turn towards France and England. Both countries
were able to pay subsidies which would make possible increases in the
Danish armed forces in case of war. In principle Sehested believed that it
would be to the advantage of both northern Crowns to co-operate in
foreign affairs; but he was not unaware of the danger implied in Swedish
hopes for hegemony in the north and thus, by his alignment with France
and England, wanted to move closer to Sweden’s ally and potential ally.
Through such a grouping Sweden might be contained, since she would
either become isolated or would have to suffer Denmark as an equal
partner in an alliance. As early as 1661 Sehested made a commercial treaty
with England which for long proved an obstacle to an Anglo-Swedish
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agreement. With France he concluded a treaty of mutual defence and
trade in 1663, but this worked mainly to the advantage of Louis XIV and
the subsidies which Sehested counted on were not paid. The final setback
for this policy came in 1665 when a mere accident prevented Denmark
from entering into the hoped-for alliance with England and drove her on
the side of the Dutch into the naval war between the maritime powers.
Even if the political system of Sehested had disciples after his day of
power, the traditional Danish orientation towards Sweden’s enemies
became increasingly dominant, especially after theaccession of Christian V.
His long reign was governed, as far as foreign relations were concerned,
by a threefold aim: to destroy the independent position of the ducal house
of Holstein-Gottorp, to end its close alliance with Sweden, and to recon-
quer the lost eastern provinces; in other words, to end the Swedish
dominance in the north by war.
While Danish foreign policy aimed at isolating Sweden, Sweden strove
to make anti-Danish alliances. These efforts led to a temporary co-opera-
tion with the enemies of Louis XIV. Owing to her German possessions
Sweden was to some extent dependent on the Emperor, who at this time
was willing to buy Swedish support against France. Swedish resentment
at Dutch trade dominance in the Baltic, and even more at the Dutch policy
of curbing Swedish commercial expansion, predisposed Sweden towards
friendly relations with the foremost rival of the United Provinces, England.
Swedish overtures were welcomed there because relations with the Dutch
were particularly strained, and in 1665 a treaty was concluded whereby
England guaranteed the independent position of Duke Christian Albrecht
of Holstein-Gottorp. Since Denmark, partly in consequence of this Anglo-
Swedish treaty, in 1666 allied herself with the United Provinces, and since
France shortly before had declared war on England, the northern Crowns
had once again moved into opposing camps. Sweden, however, did not
intend to join a power ‘ bloc ’ in such a way that she would be involved in
war. The army sent to Germany was to make a military demonstration
rather than participate in a war. Sweden was helped by the fact that
French diplomacy aimed at preserving the peace in the north. France
prevented Denmark from attacking Sweden and, at the same time,
through concessions dissuaded Sweden from joining the Habsburgs. In
1666 Sweden declared her neutrality in the Anglo-Dutch War and acted
as a mediator during the peace negotiations at Breda in 1667.
Between 1667 and 1672 Sweden’s position in the constantly shifting
alliances changed as frequently as that of England. Her moves and
counter-moves, among other factors, depended on opposing views within
the Swedish Council. In principle the Council was agreed on the need to
maintain peace and a balance of power in Europe; there was also agree-
ment on the need to keep Denmark isolated while avoiding Swedish
isolation. There was, however, no agreement as to how far Sweden dare
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go without risk of being involved in war, or on the advantages and dis-
advantages of one power group compared with another. The factors which
finally made her decide for France included the successes of Louis XIV in
Germany, England's change from the Triple Alliance to co-operation
with France, and the fear that Louis XIV might move closer to Denmark
if Sweden maintained a negative attitude towards French overtures.
A Franco-Swedish treaty was signed in 1672: against a promise of large
subsidies and a French guarantee of the position of the duke of Holstein-
Gottorp, Sweden agreed to send an army to Germany. By threatening
not to pay subsidies Louis XIV forced Sweden to attack Brandenburg, the
ally of the United Provinces, and in June 1675 the Swedish army suffered a
defeat at Fehrbellin. Against her will Sweden had been dragged into the
struggle of the great powers.
Meanwhile Danish diplomacy remained non-committal, though nego-
tiations were started with various powers to prevent the isolation of
Denmark. After Sweden had definitely joined France, and while Louis
XIV’s fortunes visibly declined in 1673-4, Denmark entered into an
alliance with the Emperor whereby she undertook to declare war on
France if yet another power, that is, Sweden, attacked the Dutch. Efforts
made by Sweden and France to keep the Danes neutral were unsuccessful.
At the news of the Swedish defeat at Fehrbellin Christian V arrested the
duke of Holstein-Gottorp, forced him to renounce the sovereignty over
his lands and to cede his fortresses to Denmark. By this coup Christian V
deprived Sweden of her valuable base in Denmark’s rear.
The war of 1675-9 opened badly for Sweden, who suffered reverses
unequalled in the opening stages of any war during her period of great-
ness. The battle of Fehrbellin, an insignificant clash of arms, robbed the
Swedish army of that nimbus of strength which had surrounded it since
the Thirty Years War. As the Swedish fleet could not prevail against the
Danish fleet reinforced by a Dutch squadron, Sweden’s German provinces
were doomed. Pomerania was occupied by Brandenburg. The Liineburg
dukes, helped by Brandenburgers and Danes, conquered the duchies of
Bremen and Verden. Wismar had to capitulate after a siege and blockade
by the Danish army and navy. In 1676 the war was carried on to Swedish
soil, when Christian V moved an army across the Sound in order to regain
the provinces lost in 1658. All but one of the Scanian fortresses fell into his
hands. The population of Scania, still loyal to Denmark, made common
cause with her. What saved the situation for Sweden was above all the
energetic work of Charles XI — declared of age in 1672 — ably supported
by Johan Gyllenstiema, who soon achieved a dominant influence. In the
late autumn of 1676 a Swedish army marched into Scania and beat the
Danes in the bloody battle of Lund. Christian V had to surrender one
after another of the Scanian castles, while the bitter guerrilla warfare
between the population and the Swedish troops continued for years.
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In spite of Swedish setbacks in Germany the peace of 1679 brought only
slight territorial losses. This was due in part to Louis XIV’s clever diplo-
macy, and in part also to the circumstance that neither the Dutch nor the
Emperor desired Swedish losses. Thus Louis XIV, without any real con-
sultation, made peace on Sweden’s behalf with her enemies : the Luneburg
princes received some small gains from Bremen and Verden, Brandenburg
was given a small strip of eastern Pomerania, and Denmark gained
nothing at all.
Louis XIV’s failure to consult Charles XI was resented. France had
also gone back on the promise, given in the alliance of 1672, not to make
peace with the United Provinces till Sweden had received certain conces-
sions in respect of tolls, and had included in the peace treaty with the
Dutch a trade agreement so disadvantageous that Charles XI refused to
ratify it. Sweden in 1679 was therefore equally dissatisfied with France
and the United Provinces. Christian V was similarly disillusioned. The
United Provinces had betrayed him in 1678 and made a separate peace,
while France had forced him to end the war without any gain. Sweden
and Denmark thus found themselves united in anti-French and anti-
Dutch sentiments. In Sweden Johan Gyllenstierna now controlled foreign
policy. In the Council before the war he had consistently warned against
the French alliance and he shared the king’s resentment at Louis XIV’s
treatment of Sweden. Nor did he favour a policy of co-operation with
the United Provinces. It is against this background that the peace negotia-
tions with Denmark took place which, on Gyllenstiema’s initiative, were
started at Lund and led to a treaty between Charles XI and Christian V in
the autumn of 1679. The clauses of this treaty corresponded exactly to the
terms laid down by Louis XIV ; the real significance of the treaty is to be
found in its secret articles which envisaged a far-reaching co-operation
between the northern Crowns. Neither partner was to make any agree-
ment or enter into any alliance with another power without informing and
consulting the other. If either ally found it necessary to begin a war of
aggression, the other must be informed and, if a joint war were undertaken,
the gains must be shared. Admittedly each State had its own particular
spheres of interest, where co-operation was neither essential nor possible,
for example, Sweden’s relations with Russia ; but in respect of the German
Empire collaboration became obligatory. The alliance was sealed by the
renewal of the engagement between Charles XI and Christian’s sister
Ulrika Eleonora.
The remarkable change from traditional opposition, intensified by a
ruthless war, to a close alliance has been much discussed among historians
since the secret articles became known in the 1870’s. There was a common
Scandinavian interest, for example, against the United Provinces; but that
community of interest was not new. In reality the alliance was neither so
new nor so startling as appears at first sight, but there were several prece-
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dents. Even Johan Gyllenstiema had in the debates preceding the war of
1675 stressed the advantages of a united northern front; but the policy of
co-operation was then — as later — indissolubly linked with the rivalry for
domination of the north. In 1679 this rivalry showed itself most clearly
in respect of the duke of Holstein-Gottorp, who at the peace had been
reinvested with his possessions. While Denmark vainly tried to get binding
assurances that Sweden would not in future interfere in the duke’s rela-
tions with Denmark, Gyllenstiema carefully avoided any such promise.
Indeed, at the very time of the treaty negotiations, Sweden was attempting
to remove those ducal advisers who were considered too pro-Danish and
to replace them by partisans of Sweden. Holstein-Gottorp was still
regarded as essential to Sweden. What Gyllenstiema intended was a close
Scandinavian alliance, but an alliance in which Sweden should be the
dominating partner. Thus his policy was not so very different from that of
Charles X who attempted to unite the north by force of arms. As soon as
this became clear, Christian V disengaged himself from the Treaty of
Lund, and the efforts of the northern Crowns to isolate each other were
resumed.
More revolutionary and, above all, more lasting effects of the war
appeared in Swedish domestic developments. Exactly as the war of
1657-60 gave the impetus to the introduction of absolutism in Denmark-
Norway, the war of 1675-9 led to absolutism in Sweden. Account must
also be taken of the financial predicament of the regency government
during Charles XI’s minority. In 1660 troops had to be paid off, officers
had to be rewarded, and the expenses of a strong defence had to be met.
The high nobility dominated the government, and therefore the solution
advocated by the non-noble Estates and by some of the lower nobility,
namely a resumption of alienated Crown lands, was not adopted. Indeed,
in spite of attempts at economy, the alienation of Crown lands continued,
especially in the provinces gained from Denmark. In general the govern-
ment tried to uphold the existing social order and privileges against the
demands of the non-noble classes. It hoped furthermore to prolong
its power beyond the time when the king would be declared of age, and
tried to limit the royal power by demanding from Charles XI an assurance
which would in fact curtail the power of the Crown. This attempt failed
because of the opposition it met, especially from the lower nobility; but
until the outbreak of war the young monarch remained dependent on the
Council of high nobles and especially on the group led by Magnus
Gabriel de la Gardie.
The war brought about a remarkable development of the king’s per-
sonality. In the autumn of 1675 he left Stockholm to put himself,
according to custom, at the head of his army. Thus he became isolated
from the Council, which remained in the capital, and surrounded by men
of the lower nobility and commoners. Under the influence of Gyllen-
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stierna, the king’s dominating adviser, he increasingly took decisions
before submitting matters to the Council, so that by the end of the war the
Council had in reality lost power. Charles XI publicly maintained that he
was not bound to heed its advice. As Sweden had been dragged into the
war badly prepared and armed, it was natural to blame the regency
government. Already at the diet of 1675 the Estates demanded an inquiry
into the regency administration and a commission was constituted for this
purpose. Its findings were complete by 1680 and hung like a cloud over
the high officials and the Council, threatening also the economic position
of regents and councillors by the prospect of fines for maladministration
and bad advice.
During the war Charles XI and his advisers had determined to make
impossible a recurrence of that state of unpreparedness in which Sweden
found herself in 1675-6. The regency government had shown great con-
cern for the building of new ships and for the navy in general ; but the war
demonstrated that the main naval station, Stockholm, though suitable for
action in the eastern Baltic, was unsuitable for action in the rest of the
Baltic. The need for a naval station in the former Danish province of
Blekinge was obvious; work was begun in 1680 and the station was called
Karlskrona after the king. Lack of trained troops seemed to Charles XI
and Gyllenstierna the main reason for the setbacks of 1676 in Scania, and
therefore plans for the creation of a standing army were prepared. After
the war Charles XI and his advisers were ready with an important pro-
gramme of military reorganisation. Its realisation demanded much
money, and Sweden’s financial situation — precarious already before the
war — had meanwhile further deteriorated. Repeated contributions and
conscription hit not only the non-noble Estates, but also the nobility, so
that the Estates demanded a relief from the burden of taxation. Para-
doxically, Charles XI and Gyllenstierna saw in the steadily mounting
dissatisfaction with heavy taxation a means that could be used to solve
the Crown’s financial difficulties. Among the non-noble Estates and the
lower nobility demands for a reduction of the larger fiefs were once more
voiced. Such a resumption of Crown lands, as the king and his advisers
realised, could provide the financial basis for a standing army, so that the
levying of extraordinary contributions would become less frequent. The
domestic reforms had already begun, though they had not yet received
their final sanction by the diet, when Johan Gyllenstierna died in the
summer of 1680.
At the diet which met some months later, the Estates asked to have
communicated to them the findings of the commission of inquiry into the
regency government. This was done and a committee of the Estates was
appointed with full powers to sentence the members of the regency
government. During the following years they were ordered to refund
large sums on charges of maladministration and self-interest. Hardest hit
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was the great Chancellor, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, one of the biggest
landowners, who lost practically all his fortune. When the Estates
answered Charles XI’s question, whether he was obliged to consult the
Council in affairs of the State, in the negative, its political decline was con-
firmed. During the diet the resumption of Crown lands was brought up for
discussion, first in the Peasant Estate. In the House of the Nobility the
reformers succeeded in winning over the lower nobility to the principles
of the reduction programme. All the large ducal and baronial fiefs would
be resumed, and the conquered provinces would be declared ‘inalienable
places’, which meant that all fiefs which had been granted there would be
resumed and the bestowal of new ones would be prohibited. Elsewhere
all fiefs which produced an annual income of more than 600 Swedish daler
would be resumed. These proposals caused consternation among the high
nobility; but faced with the defection of the lower nobility and the threat
of being outvoted by the three other Estates they gave way. The reduction
was thus agreed upon in 1680, and a commission was appointed to work
out the practical details.
The power of the Estates remained formally intact, in respect of legisla-
tion, the voting of supply, and in questions of foreign policy. At the next
diet, in 1682, the king was given unlimited legislative authority and power
over the resumption of Crown lands. The method was the same as that
used against the Council in 1680: the king posed the question whether he
was not, according to the constitution, empowered in times of need to
resume alienated lands, and whether he was not ‘permitted to make laws
and regulations, rules and decrees’ without consulting the Estates. In
either case he received an affirmative answer. There was still room for the
extension of royal power in respect of foreign policy and the voting of
supply. During the last diets of his reign Charles XI secured sole control
of these two fields. The diets of 1686 and 1689 were made necessary by the
Crown’s need of money. Their relatively short duration, compared with
those held earlier, reflects the decline of the Estates. The diets of 1680 and
1682 sat for two and a half and three months respectively, and that of 1686
for about two months; but that of 1689 lasted only six, and that of 1693
only three weeks. There was no longer anything to negotiate. When in
1686 foreign affairs were, according to custom, to be debated, the Estates
were told that the king did not desire any answer to his address; he would
in future only inform the Estates of the foreign situation if he needed
supply. Consequently the Estates after 1686 limited themselves to thank-
ing the king for ‘his great care, industry and concern’, without adding any
opinions or advice of their own.
Through the resumption of Crown lands and other permanent financial
arrangements voted by the Estates, the royal finances improved so much
that Charles XI, at the diet of 1693, could give the hitherto rare message
that ‘no supply was necessary’; but he demanded a general permission to
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levy contributions and to float loans under the guarantee of the Estates in
case of need. The fines imposed upon the members of the regency govern-
ment, the resumption of Crown lands and the reorganisation of the
administration made the king independent of the Estates in times of peace.
The first are reckoned to have amounted to 4 million Swedish daler.
According to figures which were put forward at the accession of
Charles XII in 1697 the resumption increased the yearly revenue by
2 million Swedish daler ; to this sum Sweden-Finland contributed 700,000
daler and the trans-Baltic provinces the rest. The public debt, estimated
in 1681 at 44 million daler, had by 1697 been reduced to ii£ million.
About 80 per cent of all the farms alienated to the nobility returned to the
Crown or to peasants who paid taxes to the Crown. On this basis the
military and civil administration was rebuilt by the so-called indelningsverk :
the income from certain farms was earmarked for certain officials, officers
were assigned farms to live on, etc. The permission granted in 1693 to levy
contributions and float loans made the king independent of the Estates
even in times of war; since the Estates at the same time agreed to leave all
matters pertaining to foreign policy completely in the king’s hands, they
need no longer be summoned. The consummation of this development
appeared in the Declaration of Sovereignty of 1693, which called the king
‘an absolute, all-commanding and governing sovereign king’, who was
not responsible to anyone on earth for his actions.
The economic system which was established by the resumption of
Crown lands certainly gave a greater stability to Sweden’s finances. It
could not be foretold, however, how the system would function under the
stress of a great war. The resumption and the fines imposed upon regents
and councillors also brought about changes in the structure of society.
Complete misery, even for individual noblemen, rarely resulted, since it
was usually possible to retain the manor farm, the sateri, by ceding to the
Crown tenant-farms. The difficulty of paying in cash large fines and other
sums demanded by the Crown forced many noblemen to sell their land at
too low a price. This created an opportunity for the new service nobility,
which was developing under State protection, to acquire estates cheaply.
While the nobility in 1655 possessed two-thirds of the total number of
farms inside Sweden-Finland, the proportion at the end of the seventeenth
century inside the new borders (that is, including the provinces conquered
from Denmark-Norway) was: 33 per cent of the farms was owned by the
nobility, 36 per cent by the Crown, and the final 3 1 per cent by the tax-
paying peasants. Thus a large number of peasants, who had been dependent
upon the nobility, became either Crown tenants or, if they owned their
land, tax-payers to the Crown. When the Crown tenants in the eighteenth
century were permitted to buy the land which they farmed, the free
peasant population increased. Since the tax-paying peasants were freed
from dependence on the nobility, this meant the saving of the Swedish
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peasant class as a landowning and politically active Estate. Through the
indelningsverk the peasants became dependent upon the holders of royal
offices or commissions instead of upon the nobility ; thus there was no imme-
diate improvement, and peasant complaints were as numerous as before.
In fact, however, the free peasant Estate was safeguarded, and the
indelningsverk of Charles XI remained the basis of the military organisa-
tion of Sweden down to the early twentieth century.
If the factors which brought about the change of regime in the two
Scandinavian States are considered, the similarities are striking. In either
case the king could play off the lower Estates against the nobility. A des-
tructive war, in both cases between Denmark and Sweden, had exposed
the weak points of the regime and had destroyed the financial founda-
tions of the State so that sweeping changes in the administration proved
essential. Frederick III during the siege of Copenhagen of 1658-9 and
Charles XI in the Scanian war of 1676-9 made personal contributions to
the war which were enhanced by royalist propaganda. The traditional
tendency of the lower Estates to seek the support of the Crown against the
nobility was intensified. The course of events at the decisive meetings, the
diet of Copenhagen of 1660 and that of Stockholm of 1680, therefore
developed along similar lines: co-operation between a court circle and
the lower Estates forced the aristocracy to retreat. But there the simi-
larities end. Danish absolutism was introduced all of a piece and was
then codified in the King’s Law of 1665. Caroline absolutism advanced
step by step, sometimes as if by accident, during the diets of the 1680’s, to
be consummated in the Declaration of Sovereignty of 1693. The reason
for this can be found in the different constitutional ideas which motivated
the change. Danish absolutism was founded on natural law ; power was
transferred to the king through a treaty between people and ruler. This
was done under certain conditions, and the king was in his exercise of
power bound by the existing laws. Swedish absolutism, on the other hand,
grew out of a reinterpretation of the existing fundamental law, the
medieval law of the land. When finally it was given a theoretical founda-
tion in the Declaration of Sovereignty this was done through an antithesis
of natural law, the theocratical conception of the State: the words of
the declaration of 1680 that the king must govern ‘according to the law’
were replaced by the words ‘according to his pleasure and as a Christian
king’. He was not tied by temporal laws and was responsible only to
God.
The measures which the two absolute governments took to solve
their difficulties were also diametrically opposed. In Denmark-Norway
Hannibal Sehested tried to balance the budget by cutting down the army;
while Charles XI, as soon as the war was over, increased the army to a
total of about 63,000 (25,000 serving in garrisons outside Sweden-Finland
and about 38,000 recruited in Sweden on the basis of the indelningsverk).
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Sehested made big alienations of Crown lands to the creditors of the
Crown and organised a new tax system founded on money, a change in
the spirit of mercantilism; whereas in Sweden the resumption of Crown
lands and the ‘registration’ of the resources at the disposal of the Crown
seemed to point in the opposite direction. In Sweden the introduction of
absolutism implied that the fiefs of the nobility and many noble estates
were transferred to the Crown or to landowning peasants. In Denmark the
area of land owned by the nobility and other owners of large estates
increased at the expense of the Crown and the peasants. While Caroline
absolutism in the long run led to the liberation of the peasants, Danish
absolutism worsened the condition of the peasants. In both countries
absolutism led to the creation of a new service nobility ; but in Sweden this
nobility did not remain as separate from the old nobility as it did in
Denmark. Members of the old Swedish families continued to serve the
State in various capacities and the new families were quickly assimilated.
Although there was a German element within the Swedish service nobility,
that element never became as important as it did in Denmark.
There remains to be considered the relation between the Swedish Crown
and the provinces on the Baltic. Ever since their conquest the degree of
their incorporation with Sweden had been debated. The issue was whether
they should receive Swedish laws and privileges and be represented in the
Swedish diet, or whether they should continue to live under their own
laws and privileges and keep their own local Estates. The Swedish nobility
was opposed to the former alternative, since its members had acquired
estates in these provinces where the nobility had a more dominating posi-
tion, particularly in relation to their peasants, than was the case in Sweden.
The situation was different in the provinces conquered from Denmark-
Norway, where the social structure far more closely resembled that of
Sweden than in the Baltic and German provinces. Charles X had clearly
intended to incorporate these provinces with Sweden, yet little was done
in this direction during Charles XI’s minority, and thus the population was
still pro-Danish when war broke out in 1675. The revolts in northern
Scania and Blekinge made it clear to Charles XI and his advisers that a
more radical policy was essential. Already during the war it was decided
that Swedish law and religious services in Swedish were to be introduced
as soon as peace was restored. Conscious and patient efforts were made
after the war to make the Estates of these provinces desire greater uni-
formity with Sweden, and the foundation was thus laid for a change in
nationality which seems more striking than almost any other case in
Europe. Most influential was the change in the religious services at a
time when the Church constituted the sole effective instrument of State
propaganda. But the efforts of the bishop of Lund, Knut Hahn, and of
the governor-general of the southern provinces, Rutger von Ascheberg, to
gain the confidence of the local population were equally important.
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The attempts at Swedification were not limited to the provinces con-
quered from Denmark-Norway, but were extended to Livonia and
Estonia which — with their com and timber exports — were of great eco-
nomic importance for Sweden, producing about one-third of the revenues
of Sweden-Finland. The Livonian diets persistently refused to recognise
the validity of the Swedish resumption decrees for their province since
they were not represented in the Swedish diet which agreed to the resump-
tion of Crown lands. This attitude angered Charles XI; it seemed pre-
sumptuous to him that he should be hindered in the exercise of his power
by a provincial diet while ‘His Majesty’s Estates’ in Sweden had fully
accepted his absolute power. Since it was the German nobility, prominent
in the province ever since the days of the Teutonic Order, which led the
opposition it was tempting for the Swedish Crown to break the opposition
by collaboration with the Livonian people. This could be achieved, it was
hoped, by the introduction of Swedish institutions. In 1690 the Swedish
church law of 1686 was introduced both in Livonia and Estonia. In the
same year the Academy of Dorpat was founded, with Swedish professors
who taught in Swedish, and it was decreed that only those who had
studied for no less than two years at the Academy could hold administra-
tive offices in Livonia. The authorities tried to exclude German students
from the Academy, and Swedish and Finnish students were in a majority.
It was further decreed that these should have preferential rights compared
with the Germans in the filling of ecclesiastical appointments in Livonia.
In 1694 Charles XI proceeded farther on the path of Swedification by
issuing a regulation for the government of Livonia. He had contemplated
complete incorporation of Livonia with Sweden, but had given in to
warnings against so radical a step and the Livonian diet was therefore
maintained. Its only remaining function, however, was to meet when the
king desired extraordinary contributions, so that it lost its importance and
became ‘a registration office for the royal tax decrees’. In this way
absolutism was introduced also in Livonia. At the same time it was
decided that Swedish civil law should be applied as much as possible; the
official correspondence should in future be conducted in Swedish so that
the Livonian nobility should ‘increasingly become used to the language’.
These measures caused an open breach with the German nobility. Soon
a group of noblemen, led by Johann Reinhold Patkul, began to conspire
with the enemies of Sweden.
The policy of Caroline absolutism at home and abroad during the
period up to the outbreak of the Great Northern War can be characterised
with the words ‘consolidation’ and ‘defence’. The resources of the State
were used for the upkeep of a standing army, a completely new phenome-
non in Swedish history. The army was constantly exercised under the
command of officers whose names became famous in the Great Northern
War; but it was not meant to be used aggressively. The government seems
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never seriously to have entertained the idea of continued expansion as a
means of maintaining the great power of Sweden, nor to have harboured
plans for a complete domination of the Baltic. The government aimed at
maintaining the status quo and at welding together the different provinces
with their various nationalities. After the death of Gyllenstierna Swedish
foreign policy was directed by the head of the Chancery, Bengt Oxen-
stierna, who must be regarded as the most skilled Swedish diplomatist of
his time; but the absolute king not infrequently made his will felt in
foreign affairs. In some questions he had strong convictions, in others he
was on occasion influenced by advisers. Bengt Oxenstierna was very
familiar with the politics of Europe, and especially of the Empire, and was
concerned with the safeguarding of Swedish interests in Germany and the
exploitation of the possibilities offered by changes in the political group-
ings of the great powers. The king’s horizon was, of necessity, more
limited. His own bitter experience had taught him that Sweden’s main
enemy was Denmark. Louis XIV’s annexation of Charles’s hereditary
principality, Palatinate-Zweibriicken, as well as his memories of the peace
of 1679 made him look upon France with suspicion.
Denmark’s finances had been ruined by the war; but the great change
to royal absolutism had taken place twenty years earlier and the reforms
which were instituted after 1679 to remedy the financial situation were less
drastic. It is noteworthy that, while Charles XI in Sweden created a
standing army of native soldiers, Denmark decided to get rid of the
militia and to rely on mercenaries only. Much work was done in improving
the Danish fleet, which was facilitated by the rapid growth of her merchant
navy. Christian V was determined to put an end to the independent posi-
tion of the duke of Holstein-Gottorp and to reconquer the provinces lost
to Sweden. Danish foreign policy was conducted by the great Chancellor
Frederik Ahlefeldt until his death in 1686, though his caution was
bitterly opposed by those who desired a more active policy. After 1680 it
became clear to both countries that a close alliance between them could
not be realised, and each returned to the policy of seeking allies for protec-
tion against each other: a policy which became increasingly evident in the
years before 1700. The choice before each was between France and the
United Provinces.
As long as Sweden hoped to achieve collaboration with Denmark
against Dutch demands for trade privileges in the Baltic, Charles XI
refused to ratify the peace treaty of 1679 with the United Provinces; but
eventually Bengt Oxenstierna, hard pressed by the Dutch, had to accept
their terms. Arguments against a rapprochement with France, apart from
Charles XI’s suspicions of Louis XIV, were the improbability of obtaining
support for the Gottorp policy and Sweden’s need of naval support in the
Baltic, while her fleet was being rebuilt. Experience from the last war had
shown that the French fleet had not dared to enter the Baltic, while the
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Dutch had given the Danes effective and, for Sweden, fatal support.
Therefore in 1681 the peace treaty with the United Provinces was ratified
and was followed by the far-reaching commercial treaty which the Dutch
desired. In the autumn of 1681 the Treaty of The Hague was signed, by
which the contracting parties bound themselves to work for the mainten-
ance of the treaties of Westphalia and Nymegen, to offer their mediation
if any power acted against the terms of the treaties and — if mediation
failed — to defend them by force of arms; if either party were involved in
war because of the alliance, the other was obliged to render assistance.
Sweden’s association with the United Provinces had important conse-
quences. The commercial treaty implied a complete retreat for Sweden:
Sweden had to dissolve her privileged companies, the Dutch were to be
treated as the ‘most favoured nation’, and the favourable conditions
which they had enjoyed in Swedish ports during the years 1659-67 were
reimposed. The attempts of Sweden to introduce restrictions in the form
of tolls on foreign trade in Swedish ports had to be abandoned.
The ratification of the peace treaty with the United Provinces meant a
clear break with the Dano-Swedish treaty, since according to its stipula-
tions the two allies should carry on negotiations jointly. The Swedes had
not only negotiated secretly with the Dutch, but had renewed the Swedish-
Dutch alliances of 1640 and 1645 which guaranteed the position of the
duke of Holstein-Gottorp and therefore implied Sweden taking up a
position in favour of Denmark’s enemies. The Treaty of The Hague
further implied that Sweden had gone over to the enemies of France.
Louis XIV tried, with all the means at his disposal, to prevent the conclu-
sion of these treaties and had most skilfully used the domestic opposition,
both in the United Provinces and in Sweden, but failed to achieve his aim.
Louis XIV, therefore, to counteract the consequences of the Treaty of The
Hague, began negotiations with Sweden’s potential enemies, Brandenburg
and Denmark. Both had in 1679 lost conquests in Germany, made at
Sweden’s expense, which they had expected to keep. Against a promise of
subsidies, Frederick William of Brandenburg at the beginning of 1682
renewed his alliance with France. Shortly afterwards Louis concluded an
alliance with Denmark, promising her large subsidies and agreeing neither
to guarantee the northern peace-treaties nor to prevent Denmark from
attacking Holstein-Gottorp.
During the years 1682-4 Brandenburg and Denmark were both keen to
take the offensive, but Louis XIV restrained them. His purpose was not
to start another war in the north, but to create a counterbalance to the
Dutch-Swedish alliance. Nevertheless Christian V — now completely under
the sway of a belligerent group — in the autumn of 1682 invaded Holstein-
Gottorp. In 1684 Denmark officially deprived the duke of his part of
Slesvig and declared it for ever incorporated with Denmark.
Sweden watched this action against Holstein-Gottorp with apprehen-
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sion. Charles XI was, however, not ready to give military aid and the
duke’s appeal for help according to the treaty of alliance was answered
with vague promises. Sweden dared not risk a direct attack on her
German possessions, for in 1683 an offensive alliance between Branden-
burg, Denmark and France had been signed. Although it was never
ratified by Louis XIV, the presence of a French squadron in the Baltic,
while a Dutch fleet cruised in the North Sea, shows the critical situation
in the summer of 1683.
During the armistice negotiations at Ratisbon in 1684 1 Sweden failed
to gain support for her claim that the restitution of Palatinate-Zwei-
briicken and of Holstein-Gottorp should be included in the settlement;
she was equally unsuccessful in her demand that a specific guarantee of
her possessions should be included in the armistice. Hence Sweden con-
tinued negotiations with other powers trying to find support for her
demands. Negotiations with the Emperor led to Sweden’s accession to
the League of Augsburg of 1686. More important were the diplomatic
consequences which resulted from Brandenburg’s change of policy: a
treaty of alliance was signed between her and Sweden in 1686 which
echoed the terms of the treaties which the Elector had concluded with
the Dutch and Leopold I: the Westphalian peace and the Ratisbon
armistice were to be maintained; Frederick William promised help to
solve the Holstein-Gottorp question, preferably by peaceful means; both
parties guaranteed each other’s possessions in Livonia and Prussia
respectively.
Through Brandenburg’s change into the anti-French camp and her
alliance with Sweden, Denmark became isolated, and after the death of
Ahlefeldt her policy became more aggressive. A conflict between the
Liineburg duke George William of Celle and the Free City of Hamburg
seemed to offer Denmark an opportunity to consolidate her position in
north Germany. She proceeded to attack Hamburg, where Denmark
could put forward legal claims similar to those which Sweden claimed in
respect of the Free City of Bremen. 8 The Liineburgers, however, joined
forces with Hamburg, and even Brandenburg hurried to the support of the
city. Since Denmark seemed bent on aggression — she continued to
occupy the lands of the duke of Holstein-Gottorp — the north-German
princes determined to stop Danish expansion. Only Charles XI’s cautious
attitude and Brandenburg’s opposition prevented open war. In the spring
of 1687 a defensive alliance was signed between Charles XI and Dukes
George William and Ernest Augustus of Liineburg.
The conflicts of the north were taking place while Louis XTV prepared
his attack on the Rhine Palatinate. Because of the impending conflict
both France and the Emperor strove to avoid complications in the north.
Thus all interested parties were brought by pressure from the great powers
1 See above, ch. ix, p. 220. 1 See above, ch. xvm, pp. 430-1.
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to accept a proposal for mediation in the Holstein-Gottorp conflict which
was put forward by Leopold I, Brandenburg and the United Provinces,
and in the autumn of 1687 the congress of Altona met. As neither
Christian V nor Duke Christian Albrecht of Holstein-Gottorp would give
in, the congress achieved no result for a considerable time; but in 1689 a
threat of armed intervention by Sweden and Luneburg decided the issue.
They concluded a new alliance to attack Denmark unless the duke of
Holstein-Gottorp were restored by a given date. The Swedish diet was
called and military preparations began. With no hope of receiving armed
support from France, and with both Brandenburg and the United Pro-
vinces working for a peaceful solution, Christian V had to give in:
Christian Albrecht was restored to all his possessions. This, however, left
the essential questions unsolved, especially the duke’s rights to build
fortifications and to maintain garrisons in Slesvig. Swedish foreign policy
in the 1690’s continued to be dominated by suspicion of Denmark, and in
particular of her relations with Holstein-Gottorp.
The Anglo-Dutch dynastic union of 1689 and the consequent strength-
ening of the anti-French forces had important results for Scandinavia.
The union lessened the commercial rivalry between England and the
United Provinces, which the northern Crowns had been able to exploit;
it was no longer possible to play one off against the other. When the mari-
time powers in the autumn of 1689 declared a blockade of the French
ports, without this blockade being made effective and without application
of the principle ‘free ship makes free goods’, this action caused intense
dissatisfaction both in Sweden and Denmark. Although Swedish direct
trade with France was at this time practically non-existent, Swedish states-
men and merchants were alive to the possibilities created by the war: the
importance of the Baltic ports for the trade in Russian goods increased,
and it was correctly assumed that the war would bring particularly
favourable conditions for the goods needed by the belligerents. In 1691
Swedish-Danish negotiations led to a treaty of armed neutrality; the two
countries agreed to demand compensation for merchantmen seized, to
apply reprisals if compensation was not forthcoming, and to fit out con-
voys for mutual protection. This treaty was renewed in 1693.
The successes of the allies in the Nine Years War as well as pressure
from pro-French circles in Sweden led Charles XI at some points to
moderate his anti-French attitude. Debates took place as to whether
Sweden ought not to take the initiative for the formation of a ‘third party’
to force the belligerents to make peace, and a rapprochement with France
followed, especially during periods of allied superiority in the field.
During the years 1693-4 the allies in principle accepted Swedish mediation
on condition that the coming peace would be based on the treaties of
Westphalia and Nymegen. France for her part tried to gain advantages
from Sweden by concessions with regard to Palatinate-Zweibriicken.
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Shortly before the death of Charles XI the official request for Sweden to
act as a mediator reached Stockholm. The peace negotiations at Ryswick
thus permitted Sweden to enjoy the position of a great power, though in
reality the mediation meant little. It might be argued, moreover, that
Swedish preoccupation with Denmark and the Danish relations with
Holstein-Gottorp, as well as with western European issues, to a certain
extent prevented her from paying attention to the developments in the
eastern Baltic and from seeing the dangers which were arising there.
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CHAPTER XXIII
THE RISE OF BRANDENBURG
U ntil the beginning of the seventeenth century the Electorate of
Brandenburg — stretching from the Old Mark (west of the Elbe) to
the New Mark (east of the Oder) — was one of the largest German
principalities and, as one of the seven Electorates, possessed a certain
influence in German and Imperial affairs. But it was situated in the most
backward comer of the Empire, the ‘ colonial * north-east, thinly populated
and cut off from the sea and all important trade routes. Its towns were
small and declining, had lost all contacts with the Hanseatic League,
and had been reduced to obedience by the Hohenzollem Electors in the
fifteenth century. The country had no natural resources; its soil was
proverbially poor, much of it being either sandy or water-logged. The
peasants had been reduced to serfdom ; and on the ruins of their freedom
and of the towns’ wealth the nobility had established its rule, not only
over the peasants, but also over the Electors and the towns. This rule was
exercised, as elsewhere in Germany, through the Estates which dominated
the financial administration, the domestic, and even the foreign policy
of the Electorate. The east-German — and the Polish — noblemen were
interested in demesne farming and in the sale of their produce, especially
corn and beer, hence opposed to any ventures in the field of foreign policy
and to any military duties. Because of their trading interests, they were in
favour of the maintenance of peace and good relations with their neigh-
bours. They constituted a kind of squirearchy which treated the Elector as
primus inter pares — as the Polish nobility treated their king. Within the
Estates, the towns were much too weak to render any effective opposition
to the ruling nobility, the prelates having disappeared as an Estate with
the introduction of the Reformation. The Reformation, as elsewhere in
Germany, had not resulted in the strengthening of the powers of the
prince. Many of the dissolved monasteries and nunneries had passed into
the hands of the nobility, and the disappearance of the Estate of the
prelates had deprived the Elector of the possibility of playing off one
Estate against the other and of using clerics in high offices of State. As
the largest landowner of the Electorate he had the same interests as the
other landlords; for his domains, exactly like the noble estates, were
farmed with the labour services of serfs, and the beer brewed by his
stewards was sold, as that from noble estates, to the detriment of the
urban brewing industry. Indeed, until the later years of the Thirty Years
War the powers of the Elector continued to decline. He had no army,
through which he might have gained influence during the war, and his
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country was occupied by foreign troops which showed scant respect for
his rights.
It is one of the marvels of German history that suddenly, in the later
seventeenth century, a strong centralised State arose on such an unpropi-
tious basis, for Brandenburg seemed to be predestined to go the way of
Poland or of Mecklenburg. It is true that during the first half of the
seventeenth century the Hohenzollems had made important acquisitions.
It was their policy, as it was that of the Habsburgs, to conclude dynastic
marriages which opened the possibility of inheriting the dominions of
other princes if their male line failed. Through his wife, the Princess Anne
of Prussia, the Elector John Sigismund (1608-19) could lay claim to the
highly important duchies of Julich, Cleves, Berg and Mark on the lower
Rhine after the death of the last native duke in 1609, and equally to the
duchy of Prussia itself (the later East Prussia) after the death of her father
in 1618. While the Hohenzollern claim to the duchy of Prussia, which was
still a Polish fief, was indisputable, the duchies on the lower Rhine had
to be shared with another claimant, the count palatine of Neuburg:
Brandenburg only received the duchy of Cleves and the counties of Mark
and Ravensberg when the inheritance was divided provisionally in 1614 —
terms which were confirmed by the final partition of 1666. Thus the
Hohenzollems acquired principalities of great political and strategical
importance: those in the west closely connected with the United Provinces
and, after the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, occupied by Dutch
garrisons; those in the east situated on the Baltic coast and coveted by
Poland and Sweden alike. Further important gains were made at the
Peace of Westphalia. Thanks to French support, the Hohenzollems
received the secularised bishoprics of Cammin, Halberstadt and Minden,
the expectancy of the rich archbishopric of Magdeburg on the Elbe, and
most important, the eastern half of Pomerania — but without Stettin, the
important harbour at the mouth of the Oder, which with western
Pomerania went to Sweden. Thus the Hohenzollems emerged from the
Thirty Years War as the most important German ruling house after the
Habsburgs, and this with hardly any military effort of their own.
Yet these large possessions, scattered over the whole of north Germany,
from the Meuse to the Niemen, did not form one State. The gaps between
them were much larger than the territories themselves. In the centre the
Brandenburg Mark, with eastern Pomerania, Magdeburg and Halber-
stadt, formed a fairly contiguous block of territory. The remainder were
outposts which could hardly be defended in case of war and were threat-
ened by many European powers. Furthermore, they had little in common
with Brandenburg. It is true that the social structure of the duchy of
Prussia and of eastern Pomerania was the same as that of Brandenburg
and that Lutheranism was the predominant religion. But, since the
Hohenzollems were Calvinists, this was a factor which strengthened the
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opposition to Brandenburg rule, especially in the duchy of Prussia. More-
over, all these small principalities had their own governments and
Estates, their own traditions and ties. They had no more in common than,
within the Habsburg territories, the Breisgau or Tyrol with Bohemia or
Silesia, or England with Scotland. The mere possession of more lands
could be a source of weakness, as the example of the Habsburgs was to
show. The question was whether the Hohenzollems would succeed in
welding these heterogeneous lands into one State. This task was under-
taken by the young Elector Frederick William who came to the throne in
1640, in the midst of the Thirty Years War, at the age of twenty, and who
was called ‘the Great Elector’ by posterity. The task was completed by
his successors in the eighteenth century. 1 When he came to the throne
most of Brandenburg was occupied by the Swedes who were the real
masters of the country; his army consisted of mutinous mercenaries who
had to go without pay; the country had suffered terribly from foreign
occupation and the depredations of the soldiery; it looked as though it
might disintegrate completely. When he died in 1688 he left a well-trained
standing army of about 30,000 men, had been victorious in long-drawn-
out conflicts with the Estates and had created the first centralised institu-
tions for all his territories. The importance of his reign does not lie in
foreign conquest, but in his internal policy of consolidation and centralisa-
tion. From that point of view he was the most important of the
Hohenzollem rulers.
Frederick William looked upon his many widely scattered territories
as membra unius capitis, as he put it in i6so. 2 Through his possessions
on the Rhine and on the Baltic he would be drawn into the great power
conflicts of Europe — be it those between France and the Dutch, or those
between Poland and Sweden. Naturally, he would desire to use the
resources of all his lands in the defence of one or the other against foreign
aggression. But such a policy was bound to clash with the local Estates:
why should those of Cleves be interested in the fate of Pomerania, or those
of Prussia in the aggression of Louis XIV? In 1650 even the Estates of
Brandenburg declined to vote any money for the dispute with Sweden
over the Pomeranian frontier, stating quite correctly that those of
Pomerania or Cleves would not help them either if they were threatened:
why should they get mixed up in the quarrels of foreign provinces? 3 If the
Elector wanted to defend his possessions he needed an army, and an army
he could raise only if his Estates granted him the necessary means. Early
in 1652 he therefore decided to summon a general Brandenburg diet,
attended by the entire nobility and all the towns of the Brandenburg
Mark: usually only small deputation diets were called, or the committees
1 For Prussia in the eighteenth century, see vol. vn, ch. xm.
’ Urk unden und Actenstucke zur Geschichte des Kurfursten Friedrich Wilhelm von Branden-
burg (Berlin, 1880), x, 194. 5 Ibid, x, 196.
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of the Estates met to transact current business. To this large assembly the
Elector proposed the introduction of a general indirect tax, the modi
generates, to which rich as well as poor would contribute and which would
thus do away with the tax-exemption of the nobility. It was a tax similar
to the Dutch excise, which the Elector knew from the years he had spent
in the United Provinces during his youth, and it was appropriate to the
conditions of a flourishing commercial community; it was likely to
become a permanent tax and thus to deprive the Estates of their power of
the purse. Some Brandenburg towns, indeed, were in favour of the excise
because they hoped it would bring them an alleviation from the crushing
burden of taxation (the towns having to contribute 59 per cent to each
tax). The opposition of the nobility, however, was so strong that the
proposal had to be dropped. The Estates then offered the comparatively
large sum of 500,000 thalers payable over six years if their grievances were
redressed, and on this basis a compromise was finally reached in May
1653, after eight adjournments of the diet. Frederick William got his
money grant and could thus recruit a small army; but he had to make
far-reaching concessions to the nobility, especially with regard to their
rights over their peasants. He also had to promise that he would neither
introduce the excise nor conclude an alliance without the consent of the
Estates and would hear their advice in all important affairs: their condo-
minium was once more confirmed. The outcome of the diet was not a
victory of the Elector, nor did it bring about any real change.
This change was brought about, in Brandenburg as in the other electoral
territories, by the War of the North which broke out in 1655. 1 It was in
this war that Frederick William, by cleverly changing sides and first
allying with Sweden and later with Poland, made the only gain of his reign
in the field of foreign policy. At the Peace of Oliva in 1660 Sweden as well
as Poland confirmed him in the sovereign possession of the duchy of
Prussia, which thus ceased to be a Polish fief and later provided the name
for the new kingdom. But the War of the North also brought about
fundamental changes in the relationship between the Elector and his
Estates. Everywhere troops were recruited and taxes were levied, if need
be by military force, without waiting for grants by the Estates. During the
first two years of the war 717,766 thalers were raised in Brandenburg, not
counting supplies in kind; and the burden increased until, for some time
in 1659, 110,000 thalers a month were levied. In Cleves and Mark
1,500,000 thalers were collected during the war years: an even heavier
burden considering the small size of the two principalities. The duchy of
Prussia suffered terribly from the fighting, looting, burning, and an out-
break of plague. In spite of this, new tolls and taxes were introduced
against strong local opposition, and the trade of Konigsberg, the capital,
declined sharply.
1 For this war, see below, ch. xxrv, pp. 566-8, and ch. xxv, pp. 574-5.
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After the end of the war Frederick William was in a much stronger
position. The army was not disbanded and the Estates did not regain their
former influence. In Brandenburg 22,000 thalers a month were still levied,
about three times as much as before the war, although the Estates had
never agreed to such a sum. When they complained that the Elector did not
consult them in important matters, as he had promised to do, he curtly
replied that it was impossible to discuss confidential affairs with a general
diet: after the experiences of 1652-3 he was determined not to repeat the
experiment. In the duchy of Prussia there was strong opposition to the
continuation of heavy taxes and to the recognition of the electoral
sovereignty over Prussia. While the nobility was conciliatory, and the
small towns even more so, Konigsberg — the only large town of the duchy
— refused to give way. Inside Konigsberg the urban commons, led by
Hieronymus Roth, an urban official, strongly insisted that their consent
should be obtained in a general sejm of Poland and that a deputation
should go to Warsaw to seek support there. They eventually appealed to
King John Casimir and made military preparations to defend their free-
dom, claiming that they could no longer bear the ‘yoke of tyranny’. In
their opinion, the transfer of sovereignty was legally void because their
agreement had not been obtained. The aldermen of Konigsberg, however,
dissented and struggled to maintain their authority against the rebellious
lower orders. This disunity proved fatal. The urban commons alone were
unable to withstand the Brandenburg army, and the abduction and
imprisonment of their leader, Roth, sufficed to bring popular resistance to
an end. The diet recognised Frederick William’s sovereignty and granted
him substantial taxes, but only against weighty concessions. In 1663 he
had to confirm all the Estates’ privileges and to promise that he would
hear their advice in all important matters, hold triennial diets, levy no tax
without their consent, and leave the administration of taxes in the hands
of the Estates. In spite of these promises, however, they had suffered a
decisive defeat: disunited and deprived of support from Poland, they were
unable to hold their own against the electoral army.
Even more striking was Frederick William’s success in Cleves and
Mark. There the position of the Estates was particularly strong, thanks to
the weak government of the last native dukes, the struggles over the suc-
cession during which the Estates had emerged as one of the decisive
factors, and the Elector’s policy of aggression against his co-heir, the duke
of Jiilich and Berg, which had been strongly opposed by the Estates of all
four principalities. The result was that, in 1649 and in 1653, Frederick
William had to make far-reaching concessions to the Estates. They were
granted the rights of free assembly on their own initiative and of negoti-
ating with foreign powers; no troops were to be brought into the duchies
without their consent; all officials were to be natives of either princi-
pality, and no taxes were to be levied without their consent. During the
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War of the North, however, these privileges were violated continuously,
and a regime of military force was erected which aroused such opposition
that the government feared a general uprising. As the Dutch garrisons no
longer supported the burghers, they were unable to render any resistance.
The Estates were no longer united because many noblemen had entered
the electoral service or had received other favours from their master. This
disunity and his own armed strength enabled Frederick William to
abandon the policy of bargaining with the Estates. A new Recess was
drawn up in Berlin and sent to Cleves signed and sealed. An ultimatum
was then put to the Estates either to accept this Recess as it stood, or their
prince would arrive with his army and treat them as they deserved. These
tactics were entirely successful. The majority gave way and accepted; a
minority left the diet, but were soon brought to heel. In the new Recess
many of the previous concessions were revoked, especially those relating
to foreign powers and the introduction of troops. But the Estates’ power
of the purse and their rights of free assembly (after due notification of the
government) and of limiting official appointments to natives of the duchies
were recognised specifically. Like the Brandenburg Recess of 1653 and
the Prussian Recess of 1663 it was a compromise solution. There was no
longer a condominium of the Estates, but they retained certain definite
rights. In contrast with Brandenburg and Prussia, however, these remained
in force during the subsequent period. As the Estates made substantial
money grants and no longer tried to follow an independent policy, the
Hohenzollerns left these far-away provinces largely alone. The reforming
zeal of Berlin found little echo in the Rhineland with its entirely different
problems and traditions. Cleves and Mark continued to be outposts of
the Hohenzollem monarchy, not only in the geographical sense.
In Brandenburg, on the other hand, decisive reforms were carried
through during the second half of the Elector’s reign, reforms which com-
pletely destroyed the influence of the Estates. At the diets of 1661 and
1667 he reverted to the plan of introducing an excise instead of the anti-
quated contribution, a direct tax on property, but again met with strong
noble opposition; the nobility declined to give up their exemption from
taxation and thus to become the equals of the lowest plebeji. The Elector
was contemplating another retreat, but a popular movement inside the
towns forced his hand. The result was another compromise. In 1667 the
excise was introduced by decree, but only for the towns directly under the
ruler, not for those under the nobility. Even these ‘immediate’ towns
were given the option whether they would accept the excise or not. Only
in 1680 was it made compulsory for the towns, and two years later it was
extended to the towns under the nobility, which had escaped it hitherto.
In this way the privileges of the nobility were not violated, but preserved
into the nineteenth century. The Estates, however, lost their political
influence. As the nobility had feared, the excise became a permanent tax
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and made the summoning of diets unnecessary: their raison d'etre, from
the ruler’s point of view, had been the voting of supply. As the excise was
a permanent tax which could be increased and extended to more goods at
the pleasure of the Elector, the towns need no longer be summoned. The
land-tax paid by the country districts could be assessed and repartitioned
by local assemblies of the nobility, the so-called Kreistage.
The collection and administration of the excise was at first left in the
hands of the urban authorities, but soon passed into those of electoral
officials appointed to supervise matters relating to the excise: the military
and tax commissars of the Hohenzollem monarchy. An entirely new
bureaucracy came into being, divorced from the Estates and their
interests and subservient only to the prince. In the eighteenth century
these new officials became the all-powerful masters of the towns; what-
ever was left of urban self-government and autonomy was destroyed by
the bureaucracy. The towns remained weak, politically as well as eco-
nomically. No strong middle class could develop under these conditions,
but only obedient burghers who expected everything from above and
looked to the State for protection and inspiration. This was the system
which was slowly extended from Brandenburg to the other Hohenzollem
provinces.
In Brandenburg the resistance of the Estates to the reforming policy of
the Elector was weak, and he was able to play off one Estate against the
other. As the privileges of the nobility were confirmed and the State did
not interfere with the management of the noble estates and the position of
the serfs, the nobility acquiesced. The rapid growth of the army enabled
them to solve the problem of providing for their younger sons who could
no longer enter the Church. The Brandenburg nobility was poor and their
estates could not be further and further subdivided. State service pre-
sented a solution of their economic difficulties, especially at a time of
depressed corn prices. The nobility of the duchy of Prussia had to solve
the same problems, but they were less poor and by tradition more inde-
pendent. Their ancestors had risen against the Teutonic Knights when
their rule became oppressive, and the connection with Poland had made
them accustomed to enjoy the position of their Polish counterparts.
Opposition to a foreign Calvinist prince was strengthened by the native
Lutheranism. Even after 1663 there existed a pro-Polish faction among
the Prussian nobility which aimed at the restoration of the links with
Poland. Against them the Great Elector used all the severity he could
muster. In 1670 their leader, Lieutenant-Colonel Christian Ludwig von
Kalckstein, was abducted from Warsaw by the Brandenburg envoy,
tortured and executed : a violation not only of international law, but also
of noble privilege.
Opposition in Konigsberg was also crushed. When the town refused to
accept the electoral tax demands a ‘military execution’ was ordered
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against it in 1674. Soldiers marched in and were billeted on the burghers;
if necessary, force was to be used to obtain the payment of arrears. Soon
the town consented not only to pay all arrears, but even the costs of the
‘military execution’. Its resistance was broken and its trade declined.
The leaders of the nobility, however, realised that unity among the
Estates had to be restored if they wanted to regain their influence and
avoid the continuation of heavy taxes; for in Prussia the noblemen were
not exempted from taxation as they were in most German principalities.
To bring to an end the separation of the Estates, which raised their taxes
by different modi, the nobility proposed that a general excise be adopted,
thus taking a leaf out of the Elector’s book. In that way the diet would
retain the power of the purse and Konigsberg would be brought back to
amity with the other Estates. By this time, however, the Great Elector
had come to realise the advantages of the Brandenburg system which
guaranteed a permanent separation of the Estates. He thus gave up his
policy of reform and preferred one of ‘divide and rule’. During the
1680’s the nobility repeatedly voted a general excise, but was forced by the
new military authorities to adhere to the customary land-tax. The powers
of the new military Commissariat, headed by Brandenburg officials, began
to supersede those of the older authorities of the duchy and to make the
diets a farce. The Estates lost the power of the purse and were in practice
split into four parts: the nobility, the free peasants, the small towns and
Konigsberg. Only among the nobility opposition continued for some
time, but without gaining any success. Gradually, they also entered the
service of the Hohenzollem monarchy.
It was not in the duchy of Prussia, however, but in the Brandenburg
Mark that the urban excise was first introduced, the new military authori-
ties came into being, and the Estates were pushed back most energetically.
There the privy council had been founded at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century to advise the Elector in matters relating to the new acquisi-
tions in western and in eastern Germany. In practice the privy council,
during the first half-century of its existence, dealt mainly with the affairs
of Brandenburg and only to a very limited extent with those of the other
Hohenzollem territories. Slowly, however, it extended its sphere of
activities. While it remained the government of the Brandenburg Mark,
it became an organ superior to the governments of the other territories ;
their affairs and matters of foreign policy were discussed in the privy
council, side by side with purely local issues. It had no departments, and
there was no proper division of functions between the privy councillors,
the large majority of whom were noblemen. Originally, all matters of
State came within the purview of the privy council. But during the War
of the North, which brought about such decisive changes in the internal
history of the country, a new military authority came into being, the
Generalkriegsfcommissariat; it became responsible for all matters of
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finance and taxation connected with the army, which it had to pay, equip
and provision, and it soon acquired numerous subordinate officials in the
different territories, the military and tax commissars mentioned above.
During the wars against Louis XIV a central military chest, the General-
kriegskasse, was added into which the foreign subsidies and the taxes of the
electoral principalities had to be paid. It thus became a central treasury
for the whole State, superior to the provincial chests which had to render
their accounts to it. As the existence of the standing army depended on the
payment of taxes, the supervision and control of their levy remained the
most important task of the officials of the Generalkriegskommissariat.
This applied especially to the excise, from the administration of which the
urban authorities were excluded. As the Estates everywhere were reluctant
to grant the heavy taxes demanded, the new officials soon got involved in
conflicts with the Estates and their representatives. These officials, in
contrast with those of the various local governments, had no ties with the
Estates. They were the organs of the new State, active and ruthless, eager
to assert their power and executing the orders of the prince without any
inhibitions. They became the ‘soul of the State’, the ancient privileges
disappeared, and ‘ no shadow of liberty seemed to be left as the Branden-
burg nobility put it in 1683. 1
From the field of taxation the Generalkriegskommissariat in the last
years of the reign of the Great Elector extended its activities into that of
economic life in general. The supervision of trade and manufactures, the
financing of new enterprises, the control of the gilds, the undertaking and
financing of naval and colonial ventures, belonged to its tasks. As so
much of the economic activity was financed or controlled by the State, in
the absence of private initiative, and as the army became the centre of all
State activity, the Generalkriegskommissariat became the most important
authority of the Hohenzollern State. As the population had shrunk owing
to the Thirty Years War and the heavy burdens imposed upon it, the new
authorities were made responsible for the promotion of immigration and
the settlement of foreigners, and this became an important function of the
State. More settlers meant more taxpayers, more production, new indus-
tries and new skills, hence more money. During the last two decades of
the seventeenth century more than 20,000 Calvinists from France and
the Palatinate were settled in Brandenburg and Magdeburg. Especially
the textile industries — the manufacture of cloth, linen, cotton, silk, velvet,
lace, braid, stockings, ribbons, etc. — benefited enormously. The manu-
facture of candles, soap, paper, mirrors, watches, optical articles, buttons,
gloves, shoes, hats, vegetable oils, tobacco, iron, copper and brass was
encouraged. Thus the officials of the Generalkriegskommissariat fulfilled
many of the tasks of the French intendants, but the accent of the new
authority was a military one. While in France too intendants were attached
1 Urkunden und Actenstiicke, x, 595, 600.
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to the armies and responsible for the levying of contributions in occupied
countries, their Brandenburg counterparts had above all to provide the
army with what it required and to foster enterprises which were useful
from the point of view of the army. Even the promotion of economic
recovery and the settlement of immigrants came under this heading. Yet
the growth of the standing army, too large for the country’s resources,
considerably delayed the economic recovery.
When Frederick William came to the throne in 1640 the Brandenburg
forces numbered only 4650 men and soon had to be reduced further
because of lack of money. After the conclusion of peace in 1648 hardly
any soldiers were retained. In 1653, after the end of the Brandenburg diet
which granted the Elector money for six years, the army numbered only
1800 men. During the War of the North, however, it quickly grew to
about 22,000 and enabled him to play an important part in that war. At
Warsaw in 1656 it gained its first important victory, together with Sweden,
over Poland. After the Peace of Oliva the army was not disbanded, but
only reduced to 12,000 men — a considerable force. Although it had to be
further depleted during the following years, it soon regained its former
strength. The wars against Louis XIV after 1672 caused a new substantial
increase to about 45,000. After the Peace of Nymegen the army was again
reduced, but only to 25,000 — a force much larger than that maintained by
any other German principality. In 1688, the year of the death of the
Great Elector, it numbered over 30,000 men. It twice conquered western
Pomerania from Sweden and in June 1 675 at Fehrbellin gained a renowned
victory over the Swedes who had invaded Brandenburg. It equally dis-
tinguished itself in the wars against the Turks. It was a force to be
reckoned with by the powers of Europe and partly built up with the help
of Dutch and French subsidies. But over 90 per cent of the military
expenditure came from internal sources. In 1688, a year of peace, the
roughly one million subjects of the Great Elector had to raise 3,382,000
thalers, or almost 680,000 pounds sterling: an enormous burden for the
population of a very poor country and, above all, for the serfs who con-
stituted its major part. The officers of this army were mainly native
noblemen who began to identify their interests with those of the State.
Although many of them were unruly and ill-disciplined, a spirit of loyalty
towards the Elector and a strong monarchical feeling began to permeate
their ranks. He was their commander-in-chief, and they his loyal vassals:
because so many of the officers came from the native nobility a feudal
bond tied them to their master. A working alliance was established
between him and the nobility which thus forgot the loss of its political
privileges, exercised through the Estates. But it retained its social privi-
leges and remained the ruling class, albeit in a new form. It was the
nobility of Brandenburg, Pomerania and Prussia which occupied the
leading positions in State and army, especially in the eighteenth century.
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If the army and its administration owed much to the Swedish example —
Frederick William was a nephew of Gustavus Adolphus — his economic
policy was strongly influenced by western European ideas, those of
Colbert as well as of the Dutch. Yet the principles of ‘mercantilism’ when
applied to small, open and scattered territories could not have any bene-
ficial effect; nor could the money be kept in the country, as Frederick
William desired, for Brandenburg depended on imports of essential com-
modities. Yet some of his measures had the desired effect. This applies in
particular to the construction of a canal to link the rivers Oder and Spree
in order to divert traffic from the Oder, the mouth of which was in
Swedish hands, to Berlin, his capital. In spite of counter-measures taken
by the towns on the Oder — Frankfurt, Stettin, Leipzig, etc. — the work was
completed during the 1660’s, to the detriment of Saxony and the Oder
towns. Many goods from Silesia and Poland, which used to be trans-
ported via Leipzig overland, now took the cheaper route through the
canal and down the Elbe. Frankfurt-on-Oder declined, but Berlin —
hitherto very unimportant — developed, partly because all goods had to
be trans-shipped there. Brandenburg might have benefited more if it had
not been for the heavy and obnoxious tolls levied at Lenzen and Werben
on the Elbe which made the carriers of less bulky goods prefer the land
routes. The many electoral prohibitions, regulations and monopolies
equally had a nefarious effect on trade; but in this respect the policy
adopted by Brandenburg did not differ from that of its neighbours.
Alone among the German princes, however, Frederick William, owing
to his close connections with the United Provinces, seems to have realised
the great importance of a naval and colonial policy. Projects for the
foundation of an East India Company were made in the early years of the
reign. During the wars against Louis XIV he employed privateers,
equipped by the Dutch merchant Benjamin Raule, to attack Swedish and
Spanish ships. After the Peace of Nymegen (1679) the first expedition was
sent to the Gold Coast, financed by a Dutch company whose chairman
was Raule. In 1682 an Africa Company was founded with the modest
capital of 50,000 thalers (about £10,000) to which Raule contributed
24,000 and the Elector only 8000. In the following year its seat was trans-
ferred from Pillau near Konigsberg to Emden, much more favourably
situated on the North Sea and close to the United Provinces. The Estates
of East Frisia contributed a further 24,000 thalers, as did the Elector of
Cologne; but lack of capital remained a great handicap. In the same year
the first Brandenburg factory was founded at the Gold Coast, ‘Great
Frederick’s Burg’, soon to be followed by others. From Denmark a
trading post on the island of St Thomas in the West Indies was bought,
for the slave trade was the most lucrative branch of these activities.
Friendly relations were established with native chiefs, but the Dutch West
India Company was bitterly hostile. In 1684 Frederick William bought
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from Raule nine men-of-war for 1 10,000 thalers and thus founded his own
navy to protect the colonial enterprises. An East India and an America
Company were launched during the last years of his reign. Yet Branden-
burg was much too poor to maintain so many enterprises and to raise the
required capital. No profits were made by the shareholders and the Africa
Company soon went bankrupt. In 1717 Frederick William I, much more
realistic than his grandfather, sold the possessions on the Gold Coast to
the Dutch West India Company for the paltry sum of 6000 ducats. The
State, preoccupied with manifold other tasks, could not be a substitute
for a strong middle class.
In his foreign policy Frederick William was not much more successful.
The one great gain of his reign — the sovereignty over the duchy of
Prussia — was made in the War of the North ; but after 1 660 there were no
further gains. From 1672 onwards he was engaged in the wars against
Louis XIV on the side of the United Provinces, from which he received
substantial subsidies. Because he had no good harbour on the Baltic, the
Elector tried to win Stettin from Sweden by all the means at his disposal.
The town was conquered in 1677, but at the Peace of St Germain two
years later it had to be restored to Sweden. If Frederick William until that
time had tried to advance his interests by fighting against Louis XIV in
alliance with the United Provinces, he then dramatically changed his
policy and became the ally of Louis XIV. Against the payment of an
annual subsidy of 100,000 livres, or 33,333 thalers, the Elector promised
to allow French troops to march through his territories and to vote for
Louis XIV at the next Imperial election. Yet his hopes of gaining Stettin
through French support were disappointed; nor did the French alliance
bring him any tangible profit. During the following years the relations
between France and Brandenburg became closer still; Frederick William
supported Louis XIV’s policy of the Reunions and opposed the taking of
military measures against France.
Only after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes did his policy change
once more. The Edict of Potsdam of November 1685 invited the Hugue-
nots (his co-religionists) to settle in Brandenburg — a step bound to arouse
the displeasure of Louis XIV. Thousands came and brought their native
skills to Brandenburg; Berlin in particular greatly benefited from the
influx. In March 1686 a secret alliance was concluded with the Emperor
Leopold against France. By its terms the Elector undertook to defend the
Spanish Netherlands, to put 8000 men at the Emperor’s disposal, to support
the Austrian claims to the Spanish inheritance and to vote for Leopold’s
son when the Imperial throne became vacant, and received an annual sub-
sidy of 66,666 thalers in peacetime. It was a tortuous foreign policy,
dictated by the weakness of Brandenburg and by its need of foreign
subsidies. It showed no German patriotic motives, either consciously
or unconsciously; but German patriotism was an impossibility at a time
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when there was no Germany. It was nevertheless a realistic policy, aiming
at the strengthening of his own State and his own army, and changing
from one side to the other as the interests of his State seemed to demand.
If territorial gains eluded him this was due to the weakness of Branden-
burg, and not to any faulty policy.
During the reign of the Great Elector Brandenburg gradually became
one State, held together by one army and one bureaucracy. Frederick
William was successful in making himself an absolute ruler, although he
had no preconceived plan of doing so. He was rather driven by circum-
stances in that direction, above all by the resistance of the Estates to his
policy of unification and of becoming ‘more considerable’. For this
policy he required a standing army; this army required taxes and more
taxes, and it could be used to levy them if the Estates proved reluctant to
make large money grants. Thus the army and the new military bureau-
cracy became the favourite instruments of the Elector’s policy. It was the
army which made Brandenburg-Prussia a great power and which im-
printed its stamp on the whole State. It was the Great Elector who
founded both the army and the State. But how little he himself thought
of Brandenburg as one State can be seen from the fact that in his will he
set aside separate principalities for the sons of his second wife, Dorothea
of Holstein, under whose influence he stood. Bitter conflicts between her
and the sons of his first marriage dominated the last years of his life. After
his death, however, the will was declared invalid by his successor,
Frederick III. On his death-bed in May 1688 Frederick William had the
words ‘Amsterdam’ and ‘ London’ on his lips: he was one of the German
princes who supported William of Orange’s expedition to England.
Frederick Hr continued his father’s policy, although with less energy.
He supported William of Orange’s expedition and participated in the wars
against Louis XIV on the side of the Emperor. In 1 689 he commanded the
forces which took the fortress of Bonn on the Rhine. The Brandenburg
army continued to grow and numbered about 39,000 men when the reign
came to an end in 1713 after many years of war against France. Exactly
as during the previous reign, however, the military efforts on the side of
the Grand Alliance brought very little reward. At the Peace of Ryswick
(1697) Brandenburg neither received any territorial compensation nor
even the arrears of the subsidies due to her. This ill-success and the
intrigues of the Electress Sophia Charlotte, the sister of the Elector
George Louis of Hanover (the later George I), brought about the down-
fall of Frederick’s powerful minister, Eberhard von Danckelman, who for
the past nine years had directed the affairs of State in the spirit of the
Great Elector. He was soon replaced by a new favourite, Count Col be
von Wartenberg, who remained in power until 1710. Danckelman was
dismissed in the most gracious manner, but arrested a few days later and
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put on trial. Although the evidence against him was entirely insufficient,
although the courts of all instances refused to condemn him and even the
privy council voted that he should be released, an electoral decree sentenced
him to imprisonment and the forfeiture of his property. He regained
his liberty in 1707, but his property remained confiscated.
Count Wartenberg, however, was equally unsuccessful in obtaining any
large territorial gains. From the rich inheritance of William III of
Orange the Hohenzollems secured only the small counties of Lingen and
Mors in western Germany, Neuchatel, and later part of Guelders. But he
was successful in promoting one overriding ambition of his master.
Because Frederick Augustus of Saxony had become king of Poland, and
because it seemed likely that George Louis of Hanover would become
king of Britain, Frederick desired not to be out-distanced by his rivals and
to become himself a king. As he was the sovereign ruler of the duchy of
Prussia which was situated outside the Empire, he could make himself a
king there without the consent of the Emperor. But he did not want to do
so without the latter’s approval, and to obtain this lengthy negotiations
were started in Vienna. When the outbreak of the War of the Spanish
Succession seemed imminent Leopold finally agreed. 1 In November 1700
a treaty was signed which renewed the alliance of 1686 between Vienna
and Berlin against France. Frederick undertook to support the Emperor
for the duration of the war with a contingent of 8000 men, while Leopold
promised him a subsidy of 100,000 thalers and the immediate recognition
of his royal dignity. Two months later, on 18 January 1701, the corona-
tion was celebrated at Konigsberg with magnificent splendour, Frederick
crowning himself and his wife, to mark the independence of the Prussian
Crown of the Emperor and any spiritual power. Thus the duchy of Prussia,
the ancient domain of the Teutonic Knights, gave its name to the new
kingdom : Frederick was now king in, not of Prussia. The change of name,
however, did not mean that the duchy became of any greater importance
for the monarchy as a whole, or that the centre of gravity shifted from
Berlin to Konigsberg. Berlin remained the capital of the Prussian mon-
archy, and the Brandenburg Mark its core and most important province.
In 1697 Brandenburg contributed 32 per cent of the total revenue from
taxation and the duchy of Prussia only 16-4 — to be followed by the much
smaller Magdeburg with 15-7 and Cleves and Mark with 10-2 per cent;
these figures also indicate the relative importance of the different terri-
tories for the State as a whole. Nor did the new kingdom inherit the
traditions of the Teutonic Knights who had once ruled in Prussia. Their
State had been secularised in 1525, and the Estates which became the real
rulers of the duchy during the following century were in no way influenced
by the ideas and practices of the religious order which they had superseded.
Their orthodox Lutheranism was far removed from the Order’s crusading
1 For the war and Prussia’s participation in it, see vol. vi, ch. xin.
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zeal; their Polish sympathies were alien to any Teutonic spirit. The black
eagle of Prussia replaced the red eagle of Brandenburg as the insignia of
the new monarchy, but that was the only link which connected it with the
‘Prussian spirit’.
The elevation to the position of a king brought out Frederick’s love of
pomp and splendour. Of the Hohenzollern rulers he was the most strongly
influenced by the ‘grandeur’ of Louis XIV. The court ceremonial became
far more elaborate. A magnificent palace was built in Berlin by Andreas
Schluter 1 to replace the older and simpler one. When the building was
completed the king immediately desired the number of the state rooms to
be doubled. Other palaces and new wide streets began to adorn the
capital. Outside, at Lietzenburg (to be renamed Charlottenburg after her),
Sophia Charlotte had another palace built with a park and an opera
house. There comedies were enacted by the ladies and gentlemen of the
court and the philosopher Leibniz became a regular visitor. There the
Crown Prince, the later Frederick William I, played the part of Cupid and
sometimes performed a solo dance. To foster the development of painting,
sculpture and architecture an Academy of Arts was founded in 1696 after
the example of Rome and Paris, where Dutch and other painters taught
and Schluter found employment. A few years later there followed, after
Leibniz’s plan, the Academy of Sciences which also had its more practical
functions: to supervise the whole system of education and to promote
agriculture and enterprise, for example the cultivation of silk. A new
university was founded at Halle where well-known scholars received
appointments. The new Crown thus became a protector of the arts and of
scientific progress. The Muses seemed to find a home in Berlin, especially
at the court of the queen, soon to be chased away again by more martial
tunes. Frederick William I was not cast for the role of Cupid.
If the arts flourished owing to royal support, expenditure increased by
leaps and bounds. Between 1688 and 1700 that on food and wine nearly
doubled, that on liveries more than trebled. The king informed the
French ambassador that the jewels on his clothes were estimated at more
than one million thalers. He developed a veritable passion for jewellery
and other precious objects. He loved to make presents of gold and silver
plate, of swords, sticks, rings and miniature portraits adorned with
diamonds, to embellish his new palaces with costly decorations and
furniture, to arrange splendid entertainments and displays. An enormous
deficit soon resulted, for Brandenburg-Prussia was still a very poor
country, and the subsidies of the great powers were quite insufficient to
close the gap. The royal favourites and the faction struggles at the court
were contributory factors, and the finances and administration suffered
badly. Matters began to be remedied during the last years of the reign,
and the impending conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession
1 See above, ch. vn, p. 172.
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provided an opportunity for a considerable reduction of the army ; for in the
long run the kingdom was quite unable to maintain a large standing army
and to spend vast sums on the court and the promotion of the arts. The
king who ascended the throne in 1713, however, had already made his
choice: the army was not reduced, but augmented to 45,000 men in peace-
time, while the expenditure on non-military objects was severely curtailed.
Mars became the god of the new kingdom. Yet its first king, in spite of all
his obvious faults, perhaps deserves a better name than he has been given
by the Prussian historiography. His inclinations were, on the whole,
pacific and cultural; his capital was beginning to become a metropolis;
industry was at last beginning to develop, thanks to the efforts of the
Huguenots, nearly 14,000 of whom found a home in the Hohenzollem
lands. It might have been better for Prussia and for Germany if
Frederick’s successors had shown similar inclinations, if the army had
not become the heart and centre of the whole State. It was this feature
which came to distinguish eighteenth-century Prussia from all the other
German principalities.
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CHAPTER XXIV
POLAND TO THE DEATH OF
JOHN SOBIESKI
I n the middle of the seventeenth century Poland-Lithuania (that is, the
kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania) covered some
350,000 square miles and was, after Muscovite Russia, the largest
State in Europe. It extended from the basin of the Warta to the most
westerly tributaries of the Volga and probably had about 10 million
inhabitants, of whom less than half were Poles. To the east of the Polish
Bug and the San there lived Lithuanians, White Russians and Ukrainians,
each settled in separate regions. The Poles in this eastern territory were
chiefly resident in the towns, but elsewhere they were scattered throughout
the country. Poles were strongly represented among the nobility of the
eastern regions, owing partly to the Polonisation of the native Lithuanian,
White Russian and Ukrainian nobility in the seventeenth century. Of the
remaining non-Polish nationalities only the Jews and the Germans were
of numerical significance. The Jews, estimated at 5 per cent of the total
population of Poland-Lithuania at that time, were predominantly to be
found in the eastern regions of the country; the Germans, on the other
hand, resided chiefly in the western districts, particularly in Greater
Poland and Polish Prussia. The German element in the population in-
creased during the seventeenth century as a result of further immigration
from Germany. The ratio of the nationalities corresponded by and large
to that of the creeds. Apart from an insignificant percentage, the Poles
and Lithuanians were members of the Roman Catholic Church, whilst
the White Russians and Ukrainians belonged partly to the Uniate 1 and
partly to the Orthodox Church. Amongst the Germans Lutheranism had
a strong following.
As far as its social structure was concerned, Poland-Lithuania was pre-
dominantly a land of peasants. Many urban dwellers also engaged in
agriculture. The percentage of the population living in towns was higher
in the west than in the east; in the western districts, according to some
estimates, it reached some 20 per cent. However, the most striking
characteristic of the social structure of Poland-Lithuania was the high
percentage of nobility among the population. It has been reckoned that
in Poland proper in the seventeenth century almost one in ten of the total
population was a nobleman. Among the nobility the small number of
magnates was of special importance. They possessed vast estates, occupied
the most important public offices, and to a large extent controlled the
1 See below, p. 572, n. 1.
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policy of the State. The remainder of the nobility (the szlachta) for the
most part owned only modest landed property and were frequently
dependent upon the great magnate families. The nobility as a whole held
a privileged position vis-a-vis the other classes.
The leading role of the nobility found its clearest expression in the fact
that the diet ( sejm ), which existed since the late fifteenth century, was not
an assembly of Estates but exclusively a parliament of nobles. Member-
ship of one of the two chambers of the diet, the senate (izba senatorska ),
was reserved to holders of high ecclesiastical or secular offices, that is, to
magnates. In the other chamber, that of rural deputies ( izba poselska ),
sat representatives of the szlachta. Those few deputies from the towns who
were admitted to the chamber of rural deputies played no part in its pro-
ceedings and had only limited voting rights. The diet exercised virtually
legislative functions, and it also possessed the power of granting taxes and
dues. In this way, ever since the close of the Middle Ages, the power of the
king had been greatly restricted to the advantage of the nobility.
Poland’s internal evolution in the latter half of the seventeenth century
was characterised by a further weakening of the monarchy and by a
decay of the legislative power. The weakening of the monarchy was con-
nected with the practice of choosing the sovereign by a free election, which
had become customary since the Jagellon dynasty died out in 1572. At the
beginning the nobility, all of whom were entitled to vote, upheld the
principle that only members of ruling dynasties were candidates eligible
for the Polish throne. On several successive occasions kings had been
elected from the same dynasty (that of the Vasas) and in the first half of
the century, despite adherence to the principle of elective monarchy, the
State had not been severely shaken by the question of the succession. But
already on the first occasions when the throne fell vacant after the abdica-
tion of John Casimir, the last Polish Vasa (1648-68), the dangers inherent
in an elective monarchy became clearly evident. Party strife and the inter-
vention of foreign powers in electoral contests amongst the Polish and
Lithuanian nobles threatened to make the king a tool of individual groups
of magnates or of foreign powers. In 1669 Austria, France, Sweden,
Brandenburg, and also Muscovy attempted to exercise influence upon the
Polish election. The first four of these powers had agreed to support the
candidature of the Count Palatine Philip William of Neuburg. But
France secretly encouraged Conde’s aspirations to the Polish throne,
whilst the Habsburgs supported the candidature of Duke Charles of
Lorraine. Amongst the szlachta, surprisingly enough, those opposed to
the election of a foreigner prevailed. The principle hitherto observed of
only considering members of ruling dynasties was abandoned, and a
Polish-born magnate, Michael Wisnowiecki (1669-73), was elected king.
This understandable and politically ingenious reaction to foreign inter-
vention, however, yielded no benefit at all to the Polish State, since the
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nobility from the outset impeded any consolidation of the royal power by
electing as sovereign a man who, although a member of a distinguished
family, was undistinguished as a person. Nor was foreign influence upon
the king eliminated by the decision in favour of a ‘Piast’, for the vote had
first and foremost been directed against the French candidate, and the
result was that Michael Wisnowiecki fell ever more under the influence of
the pro-Habsburg party amongst the Polish nobility and eventually
married a Habsburg, the Archduchess Eleonora. The election of 1669
subsequently turned out to be a victory for Vienna.
In 1674 the struggle to fill the vacant Polish throne was again chiefly
determined by the antagonism of France and the Habsburgs. In addition,
the candidature of the electoral prince of Brandenburg, Charles Emilius,
at first played a far from insignificant part. But on this occasion too, none
of the candidates who enjoyed the open support of foreign powers
(Charles of Lorraine, Conde, John William of Neuburg) was victorious.
Instead the throne went to a Polish-born magnate, John Sobieski (1674-
96). He belonged to the pro-French faction within the Polish nobility, but
during the course of his reign gradually broke away from his allegiance to
this party. In contrast to Michael Wisnowiecki, he was a man of strong
character, though not a great statesman, and must be regarded as an
exception amongst the Polish kings of the later seventeenth and the
eighteenth centuries. His election was a consequence of the emergency in
which the State at that time found itself. The threat which the Turks,
Tatars and Cossacks presented to the south-eastern districts of the country
necessitated the appointment of a general to the position of supreme
authority in the State, and in these circumstances there was no one to
rival Sobieski, the victor of Chotin. 1 But as a result of the principle of
elective monarchy, the choice of an energetic ruler, conditioned as it was
by the particular circumstances of the moment, did not lead to the creation
of a strong national monarchy, which would have been the essential
prerequisite for the strengthening of the Polish State at home and abroad.
The decline of the legislative authority found its clearest expression in
the fact that the principle of unanimity came to be accepted for decisions
taken by the diet. In theory this had already been the case in the sixteenth
century, but the rule had not been strictly observed. If the number of
opposing deputies was small, it was usually disregarded by the majority.
However, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, an entire diet could
be broken up by the opposition of a single deputy ( liberum veto). The
first case of this kind occurred in 1652. At the session of 9 March one of
the deputies, Sicinski, lodged a protest against a motion to prolong the
debates by one day over the customary period of six weeks. At first the
other deputies paid no heed to this protest; obviously some of them
realised how much the working of the diet would inevitably be impeded if
1 See below, p. 569, for Sobieski's victory over the Turks.
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the objection of a single member were taken into consideration. But the
upshot was that the deputies made the extension of the session dependent
upon Sicinski withdrawing his objection. Since he did not do so, the diet
adjourned without taking any decisions. Undoubtedly Sicinski’s veto
would have had no success had not the matter been turned into a prece-
dent by those nobles who were opposed to the court. The incident of 1652
did not result in a ‘split’ of the diet, that is, an adjournment prior to the
expiry of the six-week time-limit legally established for debates. It was
not until 1669 that a liberum veto was exercised before the termination of
the customary period. In 1688 the diet ‘split’ for the first time right at the
beginning of the proceedings, even before a Marshal had been elected.
Thus the principle of the liberum veto had now been developed to its
logical end. Whatever form it took, it did much to cripple the activity of
the diet. Already in the reign of John Sobieski half the diets summoned
were not brought to a successful conclusion. The bad example set by the
diet was rapidly followed by many provincial diets ( sejmiki ).
The baleful effect which the liberum veto exercised upon the activity of
the diet was most evident in matters of finance and the army, both of
which were dependent upon resolutions passed regularly by the legislature.
For there were at this time no permanent taxes in Poland. Instead, taxes
were voted by the diet for certain definite purposes and for a limited
period of time. Although the provincial diets had certain rights in this
sphere, the granting of taxes and loans was primarily a matter for the
central diet. Principally, these regular monetary grants kept in being the
small standing army which during the course of the seventeenth century
took the place of the old general levy of nobles. The reckless use of the
liberum veto sometimes jeopardised the success of important military
operations.
With the triumph of the principle of the liberum veto, foreign powers
had an excellent opportunity to exercise influence upon the activities of the
diet, all the more so since several of them commanded a political following
amongst the magnates. This was especially true of the two powers whose
rivalry determined the pattern of European politics at this time: Austria
and France. The tensions brought about by the formation of such factions
could lead the country close to civil war. Thus in 1672 the confederation
of Goiab, formed by the partisans of the Habsburgs, stood in threatening
opposition to the confederation of Szczebrzeszyn formed by the army
and the French party. During the reign of the Great Elector, Branden-
burg also had a strong following not only among the nobles of Greater
Poland, but also among leading magnate families in the grand duchy of
Lithuania. Moreover, in the eastern districts of the country Muscovite
Russia succeeded on certain occasions in obtaining far from insignificant
support, as was shown during the Polish-Russian negotiations of 1656-8,
and again after John Casimir’s abdication in 1668. Nothing characterises
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better the internal political conditions in Poland-Lithuania during the
latter half of the seventeenth century than the growing endeavours of
neighbouring states to maintain ‘order’ — that is, internal weakness — in
Poland. In 1667 Sweden and Brandenburg signed a treaty to maintain
the existing relationship between king, Senate and nobility in Poland. In
1675 representatives of the Emperor and the Tsar signed a treaty — albeit
one that did not come into force — which inter alia was directed against
Sobieski’s efforts at reform, in other words against any limitation of the
liberties enjoyed by the nobility. Similar intentions formed the basis of a
Swedish-Brandenburg and an Austrian-Brandenburg convention of 1686.
During the second half of the seventeenth century there was no lack of
attempts to strengthen the State by internal reform. This objective was
pursued, although not consistently, by John Casimir throughout his
reign. His consort, Louise Maria of Gonzaga-Nevers, devoted herself to
the same cause with even greater vigour. She was influenced by the ideas
of French absolutism, but simultaneously by dynastic considerations
which had a detrimental effect upon the efforts to promote reform. The
court succeeded in gaining the support of some of the magnates for its
plans, which were primarily concerned with the election of the sovereign,
the voting procedure in the diet, and the establishment of a permanent
council of senators and delegates of the szlachta to act as an advisory body
between sessions of the diet. With regard to the election of the sovereign,
the reformers went no farther than to suggest that the successor to the
throne should be chosen during the lifetime of the reigning king ( rege
vivente), which would have spared the State the dangers resulting from an
interregnum. With regard to the voting procedure in the diet, it was sug-
gested that a drastic change should be effected by abolishing the principle
of unanimity and introducing a system of majority voting. But the
attempts at reform, and in particular the proposal for elections rege
vivente, were eventually opposed by most magnates and above all by the
szlachta. The attitude adopted by the nobility can be attributed in no
small degree to the fact that the court sought to appoint a Frenchman
as successor to John Casimir. A Frenchman, they feared, might display
absolutist tendencies and represent a threat to their liberties. Because of
their opposition to France, Austria and Brandenburg backed the opposi-
tion of the Polish nobility to the electoral project put forward by the
court. Thus in 1661-2 the schemes of reform put forward by Jo hn
Casimir and his adherents suffered an initial defeat. Despite this setback,
the king refused to abandon his endeavours, with the result that in the
following years a new conflict broke out between him and the anti-
reformist faction amongst the nobility led by the Grand Marshal of
Poland ( marszalek wielki koronny), George (Jerzy) Lubomirski. Although
hostilities with Muscovy were not yet concluded, the two parties did not
shrink from civil war, and consequently the king was again compelled to
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renounce his plans for reform. His abdication in 1668 denoted that the
cause of reform had suffered a decisive defeat.
John Sobieski resumed the efforts to consolidate the position of the
monarchy in Poland, but like John Casimir he was thwarted by the
resistance of the magnates and the szlachta. The reformist aspirations of
both kings were in essence very moderate. But the nobility of Poland-
Lithuania would not consent to a modernisation of the State, even on a
modest scale. This demonstrates the lack of a proper sense of responsi-
bility amongst the majority of representatives, at least, of the class which
dominated the political, social and economic life of Poland. During the
sixteenth century the Polish nobility had been more responsive to political
innovations, but in the course of the seventeenth century their attitude
stiffened. It is certainly no accident that in the Poland-Lithuania of the
latter half of the seventeenth century there occurred several gross examples
of political treason by leading magnates, such as the case of the Vice-
Chancellor of Poland, Hieronymus Radziejowski. He came into conflict
with the law and the sovereign, was forced to flee the country, eventually
went to Sweden, and reappeared in Poland in 1655 together with the
invading Swedish troops.
Polish literature and science could boast of no renowned representatives
during the second half of the seventeenth century. But, on the other hand,
Polish culture spread extensively to the east and south-east, beyond the
territory which was ethnographically Polish. The religious situation was
characterised by a further decline in the number of Protestant churches
and communities and by intensified conflict between the Orthodox Church,
on the one hand, and the Roman Catholic and Uniate Churches on the
other.
Despite considerable losses the Protestant churches were able to main-
tain their position amongst the German population and to preserve a
firm nucleus of parishes. But amongst the Polish population the Pro-
testant churches and communities had only insignificant support which
dwindled further under pressure from the State and the Church of Rome.
From 1 666 onwards, no Protestant had a seat in the Senate. The measures
taken by the State were directed chiefly against the radical group of
Arians (Socinians). The war with Sweden created a climate of opinion
favourable to such repressive measures. Like most Polish nobles, the
Arians amongst the szlachcici had rallied to Charles X after his great
initial successes. Many Arians felt especially drawn to the Swedish king
because they expected to receive tolerant treatment at his hands. In
general, those who forsook John Casimir at the outset of the war were
subsequently amnestied; but in 1658 the diet resolved that the Arians
must leave the country within a period of three years, and only converts
to Catholicism were allowed to remain. The majority of Arians seem to
have availed themselves of this opportunity, while their spiritual leaders
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went abroad. Whereas the Protestant churches and communities were
entirely forced on to the defensive, the Church of Rome succeeded in
consolidating its dominant and privileged position. In 1668 a law was pro-
mulgated which made apostasy punishable by expulsion from the country.
Under Wladyslaw IV the Orthodox Church in the eastern districts of
Poland-Lithuania recovered appreciably from the blow which it had
suffered by the Union of Brest in 1596. In the middle of the seventeenth
century it had five dioceses : Kiev, Lwow, Lutsk, Przemysl and Mogilev.
It enjoyed strong support from the Cossacks; after the commencement of
Chmel’nyckyj’s rising 1 the position of the Catholic and the Uniate
Churches in the south-eastern provinces was weakened to the advantage
of their Orthodox rival. But the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667), 2 whereby
Poland-Lithuania renounced part of her territories, including Kiev, which
were inhabited by adherents of the Orthodox Church, automatically
deprived it of much of its strength. Consequently the Uniate Church
again improved its position. In 1691 the Orthodox bishop of Przemysl
was converted to it, and several years after Sobieski’s death the bishops
of Lwow and Lutsk followed his example. From the mid-seventeenth
century onwards the tsar displayed a keen interest in the position of the
Orthodox Church in Poland-Lithuania. By the ‘eternal peace’ concluded
with Muscovy in 1686, the Orthodox population was guaranteed religious
liberty; no pressure was to be exercised to convert them to the Uniate or
the Catholic Churches. Thus the ecclesiastical situation in the east of
Poland-Lithuania began to assume an important role in Polish-Russian
relations — a role which it was to resume during the events leading to the
partitions of Poland.
After the middle of the seventeenth century the economic development
of the country was badly affected by the incessant wars, particularly the
struggles of the 1650’s and 1660’s which took place predominantly on
Polish soil. In these two decades the population declined sharply;
according to some estimates the loss was as much as one-third. The eco-
nomic decline was evident in the countryside as well as in the towns.
Between the 1640’s and 1660’s the area under tillage shrank considerably
in some parts of the country. The reduced harvest yields caused an
appreciable fall in com exports. This unfavourable development in agri-
culture was accompanied by changes in the social structure. The number
of land-hungry peasants increased considerably, for at the same time the
demesnes (folwar/ci) of the landlords became more important. Their
labour was provided as before by peasants’ labour services, but in addition
the landlords could now obtain labour from the impoverished rural
population. In the western districts of Poland attempts were made to
counteract the decline in agriculture by attracting new peasants, chiefly
from Germany. Amongst the Polish peasantry there were a number of
1 For these events see below, pp. 566-7. * See below, pp. 568-9.
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local uprisings; but only the revolt of Kostka Napierski in Podhale (on
the northern slopes of the Tatra) in 1651 gained a short-lived success.
The decline of the towns brought with it a decline of trade and handi-
crafts. The metal industries of Little Poland were likewise affected by this
general tendency. The slow recovery of the various sectors of the economy
from the damage wrought by the wars was doubtless largely due to the
prevailing political and social conditions, for example, the discrimination
against the towns by the szlachta. Thus Poland-Lithuania fell behind her
neighbours, not only in her constitutional, but also in her economic
development.
Until the mid-seventeenth century Poland-Lithuania could maintain
her international position with regard to most countries, and vis-a-vis
Muscovy even improve it in the first decades of the century. But a funda-
mental change took place after the middle of the century: as a result of
interminable wars Poland-Lithuania lost her position of hegemony in
eastern Europe. Poland entered upon a period of decline which was above
all due to the internal developments described above.
The armed conflicts began in 1648 with the revolt of the Dnieper
Cossacks, under hetman Bogdan Chmel’nydkyj, who were joined by the
peasants of Poland’s Ukrainian districts. Since neither side was able to
gain a decisive victory, the Cossack question became an international one
in which neighbouring States intervened. The alliance which ultimately
came into being between the Cossacks and Russia had momentous conse-
quences for Poland-Lithuania. In 1654 Chmel’nydkyj and his army
accepted the suzerainty of the tsar of Muscovy. This inevitably caused a
war between Russia and Poland-Lithuania to whom the territory of the
Dnieper Cossacks still — nominally at least — belonged.
The Muscovite armies which invaded the grand duchy of Lithuania and
the south-eastern regions of Poland achieved notable successes. Within a
few months they occupied the territory up to the Dnieper and the Dvina.
In the following year they advanced farther. In the north they captured
Minsk, Wilno, Kaunas and Grodno, and in the south, supported by
Chmel’nydkyj ’s forces, they advanced to the gates of Lwow. In the
central sector Muscovite and Cossack units took Lublin and even reached
the Vistula. Never before had Poland suffered defeats of such magnitude
in her struggles with Moscow. It now became apparent how funda-
mentally the balance of military power had shifted to Poland’s dis-
advantage since the abortive Muscovite attack on Smolensk in the 1 630’s.
These momentous events in eastern Europe brought about the inter-
vention of King Charles X of Sweden. In the summer of 1655 Swedish
troops marched from Pomerania into Poland and from Livonia into the
grand duchy of Lithuania. Within a few months Charles X was master of
most of Poland. On 25 July Greater Poland capitulated since the local
nobility did not even attempt to offer any serious resistance. On 8 October
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Warsaw fell into the hands of the Swedes, and on the 19th they marched
into Cracow. King John Casimir left his country and sought refuge in
Silesia. Most of the Polish provinces submitted to Charles. In the grand
duchy of Lithuania a group of magnates led by Janusz and Boguslaw
Radziwill went over to the Swedes and concluded with them the Treaty of
Kedainiai, whereby the grand duchy became united to Sweden. Thus in
the autumn of 1655 the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom was in a state of
complete disintegration.
The fact that the country was almost wholly occupied by foreign troops
did not lead to a partition of Poland-Lithuania, as was the case over a
century later. The threat to Poland’s existence passed, for the acute
antagonism between her neighbours very rapidly turned the scales in her
favour. This reversal of fortune had begun by the end of 1655. The
Crimean Tatars, who since 1648 had been allied with Chmel’nydkyj’s
Cossacks, went over to the Poles, and in November 1655 the Muscovite-
Cossack army operating in south-eastern Poland was compelled to raise
the siege of Lwow and to retreat eastwards. There thus emerged in the
south of Poland a large zone free from foreign troops. There John
Casimir returned in December 1655, and there he rallied a Polish army to
resume the war against the Swedes. This development was aided by the
fact that a national spirit of resistance began to manifest itself amongst
the Polish people. The best known, if not the first, example of this was the
successful defence of the Jasna G6ra monastery near Czestochowa against
the Swedes at the end of 1655.
At the same time the Habsburg-Swedish enmity began to have a
favourable effect upon the situation in Poland. The Emperor Ferdinand III,
anxious to prevent Sweden from dominating Poland, mediated success-
fully between the tsar and the king of Poland. The Russo-Polish negotia-
tions thus brought about through the aid of Imperial envoys in November
1656 led to the conclusion of a treaty of friendship. John Casimir, how-
ever, had to purchase this friendship by a risky concession: a promise to
promote, at the next diet, the election of Tsar Alexis as king of Poland,
that is, as his own successor. But the Poles deliberately dragged out the
subsequent negotiations on this point, so that they had no result. Yet with
regard to Poland’s military situation the treaty was of considerable
significance, since it brought about a truce in the east until the summer of
1658 and thus gave perceptible relief to the Poles in their struggle with the
Swedes. For all the efforts of the Habsburgs the suspension of hostilities
between Poland and Moscow would hardly have come about had not the
tsar himself since April 1656 been at war with the Swedes in Finland and
Livonia and thus had reasons of his own to seek an interruption of the
war with Poland.
As a result of the new political and military situation in eastern Europe
Poland was virtually obliged to fight only Sweden and her ally Branden-
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burg and was thus able to register several victories over Charles X, whose
hands were tied by his war with Russia. With the assistance of new allies
(Chmel’nydkyj, the Cossack hetman, and Gyorgy Rakoczi, prince of
Transylvania) the king of Sweden did succeed in again overrunning the
whole of Poland early in 1657; but the victories of the anti-Polish coali-
tion now induced two of Sweden’s adversaries to intervene in the war:
Austria and Denmark. The entry of these two powers into the war
delivered Poland from her distressing position almost by a single stroke.
Charles X now turned against Denmark, merely leaving garrisons in
several Polish towns. Rakoczi retreated to the south and was compelled
by Polish troops to capitulate. In the light of the new situation the
Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg, through the mediation of
Austria, entered into negotiations with Poland which led to a Polish-
Brandenburg alliance against Sweden. As a reward the king of Poland
renounced the suzerainty over his fief, the duchy of Prussia, and sur-
rendered Biitow and Lauenburg to the Elector as Polish fiefs (treaties of
Wehlau and Bromberg).
In the final phase of the Polish-Swedish war there were no further major
engagements on Polish soil. At the peace negotiations which began early
in 1660, with French mediation, at Oliva near Danzig between Poland,
Austria, Brandenburg and Sweden, the Poles were able to maintain the
status quo ante helium with regard to Sweden, as a result of the diplomatic
and military shift in their favour which had taken place in 1657. According
to the peace treaty (3 May 1660) Poland retained Polish Prussia (Pome-
relia), whilst Sweden kept possession of Livonia, apart from so-called
‘Polish Livonia’ (the south-eastern part of the country, including
Diinaburg). As far as relations between Brandenburg and Poland were
concerned, the treaties of Wehlau and Bromberg were confirmed ; thus
Poland’s renunciation of suzerainty over the duchy of Prussia was
endorsed by an international treaty.
After the Peace of Oliva Poland-Lithuania could devote herself with
increased energy to the war against Russia. Fighting between Polish and
Muscovite troops was renewed in the autumn of 1658. In the Ukraine
Poland was able to improve her position, since an anti-Muscovite ten-
dency temporarily prevailed amongst the Cossacks. This resulted in the
tsar retaining sovereignty over the part of the Ukraine to the left of the
Dnieper and recognising Polish sovereignty over the part to the right of
the Dnieper. In the north too, thanks to the Peace of Oliva, which made
it possible for John Casimir to concentrate upon the war against Moscow,
the territorial position could be altered in Poland’s favour. In 1661
Polish-Lithuanian troops reconquered Grodno, Wilno, Gomel’ and
Mogilev. With the armistice of Andrusovo (near Smolensk) in 1667 the
war came to an end. By this treaty Poland-Lithuania renounced the
territories of Smolensk, Starodub, Chernigov and Novgorod-Seversk, as
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well as part of the Ukraine, that is, she ceded to Russia most of her terri-
tory east of the Dnieper and, on the western bank, Kiev with its adjacent
territory for two years; but it was never returned to Poland.
The consequences which the wars of 1648-67 had upon Poland-
Lithuania’s international position cannot be fully appreciated merely on
the basis of the territorial changes agreed on at Oliva and Andrusovo.
The Polish-Lithuanian kingdom lost approximately one-fifth of its terri-
tory, but the ceded lands were primarily border areas, where Polish or
Lithuanian rule had not lasted long without interruption, or where it had
only existed in the form of suzerainty. Far more serious for Poland was
the loss of her position as the most powerful State in eastern Europe.
With the conflicts of the i65o’s and i66o’s the balance of power shifted
against Poland in favour of Muscovite Russia. But both in the war with
Sweden and in that with Russia Poland had on several occasions shown
that she was far from incapable of asserting her strength.
Owing to the Turkish wars of the following decades the Polish State
had no opportunity of regaining its strength. In the 1670’s the Ottoman
Empire, which since the mid-seventeenth century was experiencing a
political revival and was resuming its expansionist policy for the last
time, 1 directed its attacks against Poland. This war, like the war against
Russia, originated in a conflict between the Polish State and the Cossacks,
in this instance those Cossacks who had remained under Polish rule in the
Ukraine to the right of the Dnieper. Urged by hetman Dorosenko, the
Porte intervened in this conflict and took this part of the Ukraine under
its protection. In the summer of 1672 a large Turkish army marched into
Podolia, conquered Kamenec-PodoFsk, which was garrisoned by only a
small Polish force, and threatened Lwow. King Michael Wisnowiecki
refrained from offering any resistance, and in October 1672 concluded
with the Turks the Treaty of Bucad. By this treaty Poland pledged herself
to pay tribute to the Porte and to cede Podolia to Turkey, and most of the
Ukraine to the right of the Dnieper to hetman Dorosenko, a vassal of the
sultan.
The events of the following years, however, proved that Poland was not
so weak as she appeared because of her failure to defend herself against
the Turkish attack. In November 1673 Sobieski won a glorious victory
over the Turks at Chotin and in 1676 parried a new Turkish thrust near
Zuravno (Galicia). But in the treaty concluded there the Porte retained
almost all the gains which it had made by the Peace of Bucac. The
readiness of the king of Poland to compromise was partly connected with
his diplomatic plans. These were directed against Brandenburg. In accord-
ance with this policy John Sobieski concluded secret treaties of alliance
with France (1675) and Sweden (1677); the former eo ipso required him
to take account of France’s reluctance to see any weakening of Turkey.
1 See above, ch. xxi, pp. 508-10.
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Sobieski finally abandoned these diplomatic plans and from 1679
onwards adopted a systematic anti-Turkish policy. The alliance with
Austria of 1683 for several years provided a workable basis for his
foreign policy. Through the participation of a Polish army and of the king
himself in the victorious battle against the Turks outside Vienna, in
September 1683, 1 Poland achieved her last great triumph in the diplo-
matic and military fields. But soon it again became clear that she was no
longer in a position to compete with the other European powers. The
remainder of the war against the Turks was waged by the Holy League,
formed in 1684 by the Emperor, Poland, Venice and the pope. But in the
subsequent struggle against the Ottoman Empire Poland played a sub-
ordinate part, and Sobieski did not succeed in achieving any further
striking victories. He sought to reconquer the Polish territories which
were still in the hands of the Turks, and thereafter to subjugate at least the
principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia which were under Turkish
suzerainty. But his two advances into Moldavia (1686 and 1691) failed,
as did the attempts to wrest from the Turks the fortress of Kamenec-
Podol’sk. It was only at the Peace of Carlowitz (1699), after Sobieski’s
death, that Poland regained Podolia and the Ukraine to the west of the
Dnieper.
In view of Poland’s military and diplomatic position in the last quarter
of the seventeenth century, it stands to reason that Sobieski had no
opportunity to effect a revision of the treaties of Oliva and Andrusovo.
Indeed, by the ‘eternal peace’ of 1686 he was compelled to renounce
permanently the territories ceded to Muscovy in 1667. The shift in the
balance of power to Poland’s disadvantage, which had come to pass in
eastern Europe during the 1650’s and 1660’s, remained an irrevocable fact.
1 See above, ch. xxi, pp. 516-17.
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CHAPTER XXV
RUSSIA: THE BEGINNING OF
WESTERNISATION
T he accession to the throne of the second tsar of the Romanov
dynasty, the sixteen-year-old Alexis Michailovich, took place with-
out any incident. At home the dynasty was firmly established. In
her foreign relations Russia maintained, during the first years of Alexis’s
reign (1645-76), the peace so dearly bought by Michael Feodorovich: in
1617 Moscow had resigned the Baltic littoral to Sweden, and in 1634 had
ceded to Poland the districts of Smolensk and Novgorod-Seversk, the key
to the Dnieper basin. 1 Peace with the Ottoman Empire, overlord of the
Tatars, had been assured by the abandonment of Azov (1642). Though
Moscow endeavoured to utilise the Don Cossacks as a shield against
Tatars and Turks, she was ever ready to disavow their actions in Con-
stantinople, to avoid a serious attack upon her southern borderlands.
With the exception of the region of the Don Cossacks, the European
frontiers of Russia remained essentially the same as at the death of
Ivan IV (1584).
In Siberia, on the other hand, the area under Russian sway had been
greatly extended: in 1645 Poyarkov reached the Amur; in 1648 Okhotsk
was founded on the Pacific shore and Dezhnev sailed around the north-
eastern tip of Asia. A few fortified strongpoints sufficed to maintain
Russian rule over the sparse nomad population. In the remoter areas
Moscow’s actual authority was of course weak, but such political organi-
sation as existed was from the start highly centralised ; from 1637 onwards
Siberia was governed from a special office in Moscow. The Russian
settlers enjoyed neither political nor judicial autonomy, nor did they have
any special colonial status. Siberia was treated as an Imperial province
whose political structure evolved only gradually.
For Russia expansion into Siberia did not have the effect of broadening
horizons, as colonial expansion overseas did for western Europe: Russian
settlers were not completely isolated from their homeland, nor were they
faced with an entirely different terrain. Moreover, they did not encounter
highly developed cultures, whose strength and alien character might have
stimulated reflections on their own culture. From the beginning the
extent and uniformity of the country exercised a fatal influence upon
Russian history, by slowing down the process of concentration and
intensification. The role of space was enhanced by the annexation of
Siberia, for the open frontier prevented economic, political and religious
1 For these events, see voL iv, ch. xrx.
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tensions from becoming too acute: it was closed only by modern tech-
nology under Soviet rule. Economically, Siberia was of marginal import-
ance, apart from fur-trapping and some transit trade with Asiatic countries
(including, after 1653, China). Politically, until the mid-nineteenth
century, Siberia remained, so to speak, Russia’s backyard: a place for
exiles and fugitives, divorced from the European field of Russian foreign
policy.
Alexis’s first diplomatic task was to settle the dispute with Denmark
over the projected marriage between the Danish prince Waldemar and
Irene, sister of the tsar, which had broken down over the refusal of the
prince, a Protestant, to accept conversion to Orthodoxy. This ended
Denmark’s hopes for an alliance with Russia against Sweden. Similar
hopes were entertained by Poland, whose hegemony in eastern Europe
had been undermined by Sweden. But again Russia, anxious to avoid a
war with her formidable neighbour, refrained from committing herself;
whilst the Poles in 1646 rejected a Russian proposal for an alliance against
the Tatars because of a Turkish attack on southern Poland. The threat
from Sweden and Turkey did, however, bring about a rapprochement
between Moscow and Poland, so that the Polish envoy in 1646 could
speak of the common factors in both States, whose peoples shared ‘the
same Slav blood and the same Slav tongue’ — one of the first appeals to
Panslav sentiment in Russo-Polish relations. Moscow’s internal weakness
necessitated a defensive policy; it had to be abandoned as a result of
political developments in the Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Cossacks were fighting to extend their political and
social rights within the framework of the Polish State. From 1620 on-
wards, when (among others) an Orthodox bishopric was re-established in
Kiev by the Patriarch of Constantinople, this struggle became increasingly
a religious one of the Orthodox against the Catholics and Uniates. 1 Until
the late 1640’s the Polish State succeeded in suppressing Cossack revolts
and in curtailing the liberties which they enjoyed ; but in 1648 the Cossacks
united in a great uprising, led by Bogdan Chmel’nyckyj, a nobleman from
Chigirin and the ‘chief secretary’ ( voyskovoy pisar') of the Cossack host.
At first the Cossack army triumphed, helped by bloody uprisings of
Ukrainian peasants against Polish landowners and officials. The Peace of
Zborow (near Lwow) in 1649 resulted in a maximum of Polish conces-
sions: an increase in the number of ‘registered’ Cossacks from 6000 to
40,000; withdrawal of all Polish troops from ‘Little Russia’; election of
officials from the Orthodox szlachta in the provinces of Bratslav (Braclaw),
Kiev and Chernigov; abolition of the ecclesiastical Union; expulsion
of Jesuits and Jews; and admission of the metropolitan of Kiev to mem-
bership of the senate. But owing to the resistance of the Church on the
1 Acknowledging the supremacy of the pope, but retaining the Greek liturgy and rites
(Union of 1439).
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Polish side and of the non-registered Cossacks, the treaty was not imple-
mented, and from 1650 onwards the tide of war turned against the
Cossacks: in 1653 the encircling of the Polish army near Zwaniec (near
Chotin (Chocim)), was vitiated by the unreliability of their Tatar allies,
who clearly did not wish the Cossacks to become too strong.
In this steadily deteriorating situation Chmel’nyckyj strengthened his
links with Moscow. From 1649 onwards the Cossacks engaged in negotia-
tions, hoping to secure effective support from the tsar; but, as with the
Don Cossacks in the Azov crisis, Moscow reacted with extreme caution,
limiting herself to the occasional dispatch of supplies. A. L. Ordyn-
Nashchokin, who was in charge of foreign policy, regarded it as Russia’s
prime objective to gain access to the Baltic and was therefore anxious to
avoid a breach with Poland. However, the defeats inflicted upon the
Cossacks raised the possibility of their becoming subject either to Poland
or to Turkey, thereby exposing Moscow’s southern border. Thus in 1653
a national assembly ( zemsky sobor) decided that, to safeguard the Ortho-
dox faith, the tsar should take the Cossacks ‘under his mighty sovereign
hand’. In January 1654 a solemn Cossack council ( rada ) approved
Chmel’nyckyj’s proposal for union with Moscow, ‘that we may all be one
until eternity ’ ; on 8 January they swore the oath of allegiance. The details
of the settlement were agreed upon in Moscow in March: the Cossacks
were to elect their hetman and other leaders; the number of registered
Cossacks was increased to 60,000; existing property and judicial rights
were confirmed, as were the towns’ rights to such municipal self-govern-
ment as they possessed; the estates of the Polish Crown and magnates
and of the Catholic Church were confiscated and distributed amongst the
Cossack nobility or granted to the Orthodox Church; the position of the
peasants was improved.
The agreement of 1654 was no alliance: the Cossacks sought the pro-
tection of the tsar, he took them into his service; the tsar promised the
Cossacks his ‘favour and defence against enemies and protection’. They
demanded from the Muscovite envoys that ‘the Tsar should not deliver
them, the hetman Bogdan Chmel’nyckyj and the whole Zaporog host to
the king of Poland, but should stand up for them and not destroy their
liberty. And whoever has hitherto been a nobleman ( szlachcic ), or a
Cossack or a townsman ( meshchanin ), or whoever possessed rank or
estate, all that shall be as before. And that the sovereign may deign to
command that title deeds should be drawn up for them with regard to
their estates.’ The Cossacks listed their rights as individuals and as a
group; they made no demand for new law, and had no thought of a
Cossack State. The tsar’s envoys were requested to take an oath that these
rights would be maintained. When they refused, and the Cossacks
reminded them that ‘the kings of Poland always swore an oath to their
subjects’, the Moscow boyars explained: ‘never has it been demanded
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that sovereigns (gosudari) should take an oath to their subjects. And as
concerns [the fact] that the kings of Poland used to swear an oath to their
subjects, it is improper to quote this as an example, since these kings are
heretics and are not autocrats ( samoderzhtsy ).’ Thus Moscow expressly
repudiated any treaty relationship, any partnership between equals. It
guaranteed the specific rights that had existed under Polish rule, but did
so as an act of grace by the tsar in favour of certain individuals and social
groups.
The Cossacks were not simply incorporated into Russia as subjects, since
the hetman was allowed to exchange embassies with other countries —
although not with the most important States, Turkey and Poland, and all
such exchanges had to be reported to Moscow. Thus even in the sphere of
foreign policy the Cossacks enjoyed no genuine sovereignty; one could
best regard them as having been incorporated into Russia with confirma-
tion of their rights of military self-government. They actually continued
to enjoy a far-reaching de facto autonomy because the central government
was only able to assert itself gradually in the Ukraine.
Moscow had first to defend Kiev and the regained territories against
Poland. The war began in May 1654. Russian armies captured Gomel’,
Mogilev and Polotsk; in September Smolensk capitulated, and in Novem-
ber Vitebsk was taken by storm. In 1655 the succession of victories
continued. Minsk and Wilno (Vilna), the Lithuanian capital, were con-
quered in July, by which time the Cossacks, having taken Ostrog, R6wno,
Turow and Pinsk, had reached the gates of Lwow. Poland was also
attacked by the Swedes who were concerned at Russian expansion in
Lithuania. Swedish troops occupied Dvinsk, before which the Russians
were already encamped. Sweden and Russia, after first pursuing a
parallel policy, inevitably came into conflict. Invading the kingdom of
Poland, the Swedes compelled Poznan, Kalisz and Warsaw to recognise
their sovereignty. The king left the country; the power of Poland seemed
destroyed. In the summer of 1656 Russia’s policy changed: after con-
cluding an offensive alliance against Sweden with Denmark and a
security treaty with Brandenburg, she entered into peace talks with
Poland. Though these negotiations broke down over Russia’s demands
(for cession of Lithuania and acceptance of the tsar as king of Poland on
the death of John Casimir), they did lead, in October, to an armistice: all
unsettled questions were temporarily shelved and agreement was reached
on military collaboration. The main Russian army seized Dvinsk from
the Swedes and then captured Dorpat; but the siege of Riga (August to
October) failed, since the town was supplied by sea. In the meantime
Poland had time to recover : the people rose en masse, and the king was
able to return. In the winter of 1657-8 Poland and Russia resumed peace
negotiations, but without result.
In the Ukraine the death of Chmel’nydkyj (July 1657) was followed by
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disturbances which were extremely disadvantageous for Russia: under
their new hetman, Ivan Vygovsky, the Cossacks went over to Poland. By
the Treaty of Hadziacz (September 1658) Poland promised an extension of
the Polish-Lithuanian Union of Lublin (1569) to the Ukraine: the palati-
nates of Bratslav, Kiev and Chernigov were to be included in the Polish
State as a ‘Grand Duchy of Russia’; the figure of registered Cossacks
was to remain at 60,000; the hetman was to be chosen from candidates
nominated by the Cossacks; their representatives were to sit in the
senate; they were to have their own administration and currency; and
the Orthodox were to enjoy the same rights as other Christians. In
November 1658, under the influence of this dangerous turn of events,
Moscow concluded a three-year armistice with Sweden. Despite the
favourable terms of the Treaty of Hadziacz, the Cossack rank and file
remained loyal to Russia; in October 1659 they elected as hetman
Chmel’nyckyj’sson Yury, a partisan of Moscow. In contrast to Poland,
Moscow imposed conditions harsher than those of 1654: the election and
deposition of a hetman required the tsar’s consent ; his diplomatic rights
were rescinded; he could only pass sentence upon a Cossack leader with
Moscow’s approval, and the Cossacks were granted the right of direct
appeal to the tsar; the rank and file had to be consulted when filling
senior appointments in the Cossack administration; tsarist voivodes were
introduced into the chief townships in Cossack territory ; and the Cossack
army could henceforward be employed on military service by the tsar
without any limitations.
Even the hetmanate of Yury Chmel’nydkyj, however, did not give
Moscow a firm hold over the Ukraine. His vacillating attitude was all the
more dangerous once Poland, after the Peace of Oliva (1660), 1 was in a
position to concentrate all her forces against Russia. This prompted
Moscow to conclude with Sweden the Peace of Kardis (June 1661), in
which she recognised the former Russo-Swedish frontier, while Sweden
undertook not to intervene in the Russo-Polish war. Though now safe
from the risk of attack in the north, Russia was unable to maintain her
position in Poland, and Polish troops pressed back across the Dnieper
into Novgorod-Seversk. In the Ukraine fighting broke out between rival
hetmans. The most capable of them, Petr Dorosenko, decided in October
1666 to place himself and his Cossacks under the Khan of the Crimea.
Against this background the Russo-Polish peace talks, resumed in the
summer of 1666, led to the conclusion of an armistice at Andrusovo in
January 1667. It was to last for 13$ years, during which a ‘perpetual
peace’ was to be prepared; Russia retained Smolensk; Poland recognised
Moscow’s sovereignty over the Ukraine to the east of the Dnieper, while
the western Ukraine and White Russia remained Polish; Kiev, together
with some territory on the right bank of the Dnieper, was ceded to Russia
1 See above, ch. xxiv, p. 568.
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for two years; the Zaporog seel i’ was to be administered jointly by Poland
and Russia.
The war, which the Cossacks had begun to consolidate their military
and political organisation under the protection of one of the neighbouring
powers, ended in their being divided between them. The Cossacks failed
in their attempt to unite the area on the borders of Muscovite Russia,
Poland and the Tatar Crimea into a single State. Apart from this local
significance, the war had an effect upon the general situation in eastern
Europe. While Sweden maintained her position as a great power, Poland
lost hers. The Polish State was hollowed out from within by its obsolete
structure, and this created a vacuum which attracted Poland’s neighbours.
Complete catastrophe had been averted only by the conflict between
Russia and Sweden. Russia had shown herself incapable of waging a two-
front war: she was neither able to consolidate her position in Poland nor
to break through to the Baltic, but her offensive did bring her the strategic-
ally important frontier on the Dnieper and the old Russian capital of
Kiev, a significant gain. The Russians did not evacuate Kiev, and Poland
was unable to assert her rights because even under the brilliant military
leadership of John Sobieski (1674-96) she could not prevail over the
Turks, whose advance also threatened Russia, in particular during the
reign of Alexis’s successor, Feodor Alexeievich (1676-82). After 1676
Dorosenko, under pressure from the rank-and-file Cossacks, ceased
his resistance to Moscow, with the result that the western Ukraine also
came under Russian sway; but the Turks asserted their claim to the
Ukraine in two successful campaigns (1677-8), in which their forces
reached Chigirin. In 1681 Russia had to recognise Turkish rights to the
Ukraine west of the Dnieper, with the exception of Kiev. The armistice of
Andrusovo thus did not bring Poland any aid from Moscow, nor did the
victory at Vienna in 1683 1 bring her relief. Sobieski’s plan of regaining for
Poland her old greatness as a bulwark of Christendom by forming an
anti-Turkish coalition with the Empire, Venice and the papal curia
required, if it were to be successful, the inclusion of Russia. Sobieski
reluctantly decided to obtain Russia’s adherence to the alliance by con-
verting the armistice of Andrusovo into a ‘perpetual peace’. In April 1686
Poland finally renounced Kiev and the Ukraine east of the Dnieper and
undertook to grant her Orthodox subjects religious freedom. Russia paid a
compensation of 1,460,000 gold roubles and promised to provide military
assistance against the Turks. It was only with this treaty, concluded
during the regency of the tsarina Sophia (1682-9), that the achievements
of Alexis’s policy were made secure.
The acquisition of strength and territory brought in its train a broad-
ening of Moscow’s political horizons. In 1645 Alexis notified his accession
only to neighbouring Poland and Sweden and to Russia’s old commercial
1 See above, ch. xxi, pp. 516-17.
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partners, England, Holland and Denmark. In 1673 Moscow for the first
time put forward the idea of a European coalition, in view of the danger
threatening from Turkey. The move failed, owing to Russia’s ignorance of
the situation at western courts; it nevertheless showed how she was
extending her diplomatic contacts: the Emperor, Brandenburg, Saxony,
Venice, the papal curia, France, and Spain were now added to the States
mentioned earlier. Yet Russia was still a passive rather than an active
participant in European affairs. Whereas Sweden, Denmark, Poland and
Holland maintained permanent representatives in Russia (from 1631,
1672, 1673 and 1677 respectively), she was represented only in Poland
(from 1673). However great the importance of trade with Russia for her
commercial partners in northern Europe, by and large Russia still lay out-
side the European political system and its shifting alliances, partly on
account of distance, and partly because in the West her faith was regarded
as heretical and her form of government as despotic. Accounts of the
country by western travellers, ever more frequent during the seventeenth
century, did little to modify this view until, to a more rationalist age, the
differences of religion and historical background became less potent.
Russia knew far less about the political situation in the West. The first man
to gather information systematically about foreign countries and to
expand contact with them was Ordyn-Nashchokin, head of the Office of
Ambassadors ( posol'skiy prikaz) from 1667 to 1671. He considered it
expedient to make borrowings from abroad, attempted to escape from
traditional prejudices, and sought to conduct relations with Poland on the
basis of Realpolitik — a policy with Slav unity as the ultimate goal.
The nature of Moscow’s foreign policy was dictated by her internal
weakness. The country had not yet recovered from the Time of Troubles
(1605-13) and the government’s approach was thus necessarily defensive.
At home the autocracy continued on the course followed since the
sixteenth century: a policy of centralising the administration, building up
a strong military machine, and creating various social classes which
could be controlled by the State and had to perform State services.
Foreign invasions had shown the necessity of an effective army to protect
Russia’s extended frontiers. The Troubles had also demonstrated the
military superiority of her neighbours and brought home the need of
modernising the army on a European pattern, by engaging foreign
instructors and mercenaries and by importing and manufacturing equip-
ment and supplies. Between 1632 and 1680 Russia’s active fighting force
grew from 34,600 to 129,300 (the total strength in that year amounting to
some 170,000 to 190,000 men).
The most aristocratic element in the army — though one whose relative
importance declined from 34 to 8 per cent of the total strength during
these years — was the traditional levies supplied by the court, the capital
(‘Moscow’), the provincial and the Tatar nobility. The nobility held
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estates on full or conditional tenure and were obliged to perform services
upon succeeding to their property. Service was also obligatory for the
garrison troops, the archers ( strel'tsy ), artillerymen and Cossack fortress
guards, who lived in special quarters of the towns and maintained them-
selves by agriculture or crafts, with the benefit of tax privileges. In
addition to these groups came the so-called datochnye lyudi, soldiers
‘given’ by ecclesiastical lands and the court and State domains. From
these lands, as from those of the service nobility, the number of men to be
provided was determined at first by the acreage, but later (ultimately from
1679), owing to the varying density of population, by the number of
homesteads. For service of a specialised nature there were foreign
mercenaries, Russian troops under foreign officers, which at the same time
acted as model troops, and the Cossacks for frontier protection. Russia
was moving towards the creation of a standing army : the introduction of
a permanent officer corps, military settlements and drill were steps calcu-
lated to enhance the army’s striking power. The offices concerned with
the control of service obligations and the allotment of estates ( razryadnyy
and pomestnyy prikaz ) were amongst the most ancient central administra-
tive organs. To these, other offices were added in the course of the
seventeenth century to deal with the various specialised units and with
military equipment.
The autocracy owed its rapid rise at the end of the fifteenth century to
the absence of Estates of the realm such as existed in western Europe.
Already in the sixteenth century it had attempted, with the support of the
serving nobility and the bureaucracy, to impose State service upon
society. This basic trend of development led, in the seventeenth century,
to the creation of centrally controlled service classes, each of which had
its specific duties towards the State, without any corresponding rights to
exercise political influence. This creation of distinct social groups at the
behest of the State differed radically from the western European pattern
of autonomous Estates based upon birth, privileges and legal traditions,
conscious of their ancient political rights and special local status. The
Russian State insisted on clearly differentiating between the classes which
served it, not from respect for their legal status, but from concern that
each should perform its allotted tasks: the nobility had to serve in the
army and administration, the peasants had to enable them to do so by
rendering labour services and paying taxes, and the townspeople above
all had to provide revenue. The danger existed that some individual might
escape the burdens of State service by becoming unfree and dependent
upon someone else. In order to prevent this shrinking of its servitors, the
State sought to enforce individual freedom by legislative action.
The influx of new families into the service nobility during the Troubles
had given a new lease of life to the practice of mestnichestvo, whereby a
noble, on being assigned a State post, would compare the proposed
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appointment with those held in the past by his superiors and his and their
ancestors, and would refuse to serve if he considered it inferior to what he
was entitled to by his rank. Already in the sixteenth century this custom
had demonstrated its perniciousness, especially in the filling of com-
manding posts in the army during campaigns, but the constant disputes
within the nobility had helped the autocracy to consolidate its power. In
the seventeenth century the autocracy, wielding uncontested authority,
could devote itself to combating the harmful aspects of mestnichestvo : with
increasing frequency it was suspended during campaigns, until it was
eventually abolished by a decree of January 1682. The distinction between
estates held on full tenure ( votchiny ) and those held conditionally
( pomesfya ) disappeared, since owners of either were required to serve,
and pomes? ya could be inherited. Apart from the Church and monasteries
only the service nobility were permitted to possess lands with peasants,
and in 1649 the Church was forbidden to extend its holdings. Already in
1642 impoverished noblemen were prohibited from becoming the servitors
of more prosperous noblemen; in 1649 the government also banned the
practice of ‘pledging’ oneself ( zakladnichestvo , that is, agreeing to work
for a creditor until one had repaid a loan), which often led to permanent
serfdom for the pledger as well as his descendants.
To make it economically possible for the nobility to serve, their
peasants were tied to the land. Without labour, land was worthless. The
free peasant, impoverished by heavy taxation, sought to escape by fleeing
to the border areas, by settling on the estate of a more prosperous land-
owner who could pay his debts and afford him better conditions, or by
binding himself and his family by contract to serve a master until the
latter’s death ( kabal'noye kholopstvo). The latter practice often led to his
service becoming hereditary, so that the distinction between free and
unfree peasants became blurred. Another way in which this could come
about was through landowners, faced as they were with a constant
shortage of labour, settling their unfree menials on the land as peasants
(zadvornye lyudi). As early as 1592 the government had attempted to
prevent peasants from escaping, or being bought out by landowners, by
establishing a legal term within which peasants had to be returned to their
former owners. This time-limit, re-established after the Troubles, was
annulled in 1649. Henceforward any owner could secure the return of a
runaway peasant at any time. Thus the peasants were bound to their
masters. The revision of the survey registers (pistsovye knigi) in the 1620’s,
which determined the tax assessments in rural districts and in the
towns, had the same effect: it was naturally in the interests of a community
to prevent any of its taxpaying members from leaving. All these circum-
stances combined in making the Russian peasant a serf by the mid-
seventeenth century. The government had sought only to tie the peasants
to the soil, not to reduce them to serfdom. Thus, from this time until the
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nineteenth century, the State refrained from interfering with the personal
relations between a master and his dependants, although its own measures,
designed to create a service nobility, had been to a large extent responsible
for the development of serfdom.
The townspeople, likewise, were turned into a service class. Russian
towns were small and poor, did not possess the immunity or the privileges
enjoyed by the towns of western Europe, and were not dearly differentiated
from the villages. Within the town, not all plots of land were ‘ black ’, that
is, subject to taxation; they were ‘white’ if, for instance, they belonged to
some boyar or monastery outside the town. There were houses which
became ‘ white’ through their owners becoming unfree dependants of a lord
outside the town, but the owners continued to engage in crafts or trade,
contributed nothing to the town’s revenue, and even undermined the
urban economy by competition. Equally, artisans living in the immediate
vicinity of a town took part in its economic life without assuming any share
of its fiscal obligations. Already during the preceding reign the govern-
ment had attempted to remedy this state of affairs. In 1 649 it was decreed
that only taxpayers could live in the towns and carry on their trade ; they
were prohibited from leaving the town, and all property from which no
taxes were paid was incorporated into the towns. In Russia it was not a
strong class of burghers, but the State which separated the towns from the
countryside and formed them — but without granting the municipal
liberties characteristic of medieval western Europe. The uppermost group
in the urban population, the wealthy merchants (gosti ] ), who in the mid-
seventeenth century numbered about thirty, were State functionaries
rather than private entrepreneurs. They came under the direct jurisdiction
of the tsar and administered on his behalf the customs, the iron trade and
liquor monopolies, and the revenue from Siberian sables. They enjoyed
fiscal privileges, but answered with their property for any losses incurred.
Below the gosti, as their partners and agents, came the members of the
organisations of less wealthy merchants, the gostinnaya and sukhonnaya
sotnya. They, too, had to perform tasks on behalf of the Treasury. Thus it
was only the State and the handful of gosti who disposed of any consider-
able amount of capital.
Owing to the lack of demand and the prevailing natural economy, the
domestic market was generally limited in area and not particularly
profitable. Foreign trade held out the prospect of better returns, but it
was mainly in the hands of foreigners (Englishmen, Dutchmen, Germans,
Frenchmen and Danes) or agents of the tsar. Russia imported manu-
factures of every kind, especially metal goods, arms, cloth and luxuries,
and exported raw materials, such as wood, pitch, hemp, flax, potash, furs
and hides. The first ironworks and cannon foundries, as well as the first
mines, owed their establishment to foreign entrepreneurs. The govern-
ment promoted their activity because of the revenue it yielded and the
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example it set, and constantly sought to recruit technicians from abroad.
From the 1620’s onwards Russian merchants were continually com-
plaining about the competition of foreigners, who were better organised
and had more capital. The government responded with mercantilist
measures. In 1649 the English were once more deprived of their privileges,
some of which dated back to the sixteenth century, and again lost the right
of engaging in the transit trade with Asia. The commercial statute of 1654
abolished almost all internal tolls and protected merchants from inter-
ference by local officials. In 1667 a ‘New Commercial Statute’ restricted
trade by foreigners to certain frontier points and fixed higher dues, pay-
able in foreign currency, for permission to engage in internal or transit
trade. The standing ban on foreigners conducting retail trade, which was
continually circumvented, was now reaffirmed under penalty of confiscation
of goods, and duty-free trade between foreign merchants was prohibited.
The only genuine Estate in society was the clergy, who formed a separate,
legally defined entity and had their own representation in the patriarchate.
But they also had to pay tax upon, and provide troops from, their secular
property and were subject to regimentation by the State.
The Russian administration can be called centralised in so far as the
ultimate responsibility for decisions lay with the tsar and the highest
authorities ( prikazy ) situated in Moscow; but one can hardly speak of
centralisation according to function. During the seventeenth century the
prikazy multiplied and became more differentiated, but they were not
systematised according to any theoretical plan, and there was no clearly
defined hierarchy of authority or allocation of competence between the
various offices. It may be assumed that business in a prikaz was to a large
extent managed by the boyar in charge ; but the tsar would often entrust a
boyar with several prikazy at once, and the differentiation became
obscured. Some prikazy dealt with a particular topic, others with a
particular region. A prikaz would often concern itself with matters which
were hardly related at all, or which had only been related in the past ; on
the other hand, the same matter might be dealt with by several institutions.
In the 1680’s military affairs, for example, were the concern of no less than
eighteen prikazy. Almost all the more important prikazy had their
separate financial administration and exercised judicial authority over
their own personnel. In addition to the permanent offices for foreign
affairs, military and financial matters, the administration of the court, etc.,
there were others which were subordinate or temporary, for example, for
collecting money and grain in time of war. In Alexis’s reign there were
some forty prikazy , but the figure varied, since offices would be set up,
combined, or dissolved according to need.
The Siberian Office, carved out of that for Kazan’ in 1637, was tempo-
rarily incorporated into the Main Revenue Office between 1661 and 1663.
Similarly, matters concerning Little Russia were after 1649 first dealt with
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in the Office of Ambassadors, a separate office being established only in
1663. In 1649 the department for ecclesiastical affairs in the Main Court
Office became an independent body, the Monasteries Office. Thus all the
judicial privileges which the Church had gradually accumulated were
abolished, except for the patriarch’s jurisdiction over his own immediate
domain. The Monasteries Office, at first directed jointly by churchmen
and laymen, soon came to be manned by laymen alone; it supervised the
Church’s finances and its jurisdiction in secular matters. The Church
resented this control and in 1677 obtained its suspension. To the military
departments (for the strel'tsy, Cossacks, artillerymen and serving
foreigners) there was added, in 1651, a Cavalry Office. The judicial
offices for cases involving serving men in the districts of Moscow,
Ryazan’, Vladimir, and Dmitrov were integrated in 1685 into the Moscow
Judicial Office. Amongst the new departments was the prikaz schetnykh
del for financial supervision, founded in 1667, and the supreme organ of
control, the Office of Secret Affairs. This was not only the tsar’s private
chancery, dealing with his personal affairs (correspondence, falconry,
etc.) and solely responsible to him; it was also responsible for control and
espionage within the administration, indispensable in any autocracy; its
competence was not circumscribed.
The isolation and threat to which individual districts had been exposed
during the Troubles led to the concentration of all authority in the hands
of the local military commander, the voivode. Administration by
voivodes became universal during the seventeenth century. The voivode,
generally a member of the service nobility, exercised power over a district
( uyezd) from its principal centre, to which he was assigned by the central
government with specific instructions and was in charge of all local admin-
istrative matters. His short tenure of office (from one to three years), and
the fact that he received a salary from the central authority, distinguished
the voivode from his predecessor, the ‘lieutenant’ ( namestnik ) of the
sixteenth century, who had to be provided for locally — although even now
there were continual complaints about extorted ‘gifts’ to the voivode.
Occasionally the government took notice of such grievances, but there
was no permanent control over the voivodes. By the mid-seventeenth
century there existed more than 250 districts. Most voivodes administered
their districts from an office in conjunction with a secretary ( d'yak ) respon-
sible for current business. In larger districts there were from two to four
voivodes, one of whom was senior to the others, and several d'yaki : thus
the government hoped to establish mutual supervision, which was
naturally not conducive to amicable co-operation.
The voivode administration was superimposed upon the institutions of
local self-government which existed since the latter half of the sixteenth
century. The voivode was given authority over the representatives elected
by the peasants and townsmen: the gubnye starosty and tseloval' tiiki, who
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exercised police and penal functions, and those with general administra-
tive competence ( zemskiye starosty, lutchiye lyudi). As a rule the voivodes,
as agents of the central power, turned the local self-governing institutions
into subordinate executive organs. Thus self-government continued to
exist, but in effect as a part of the State administration — the more so
because since the sixteenth century self-government had become not a
right but an obligation towards the State. Therefore the government could
even afford to dispense temporarily with the voivodes, as it did in the
1660’s, returning to this system in the following decade.
The establishment of large administrative regions ( razryady ) illustrates
the prevailing tendency towards the creation of a system of local govern-
ment as standardised and as closely linked to the centre as possible. This
process originated in frontier areas where the co-ordination of military
and general civil functions was particularly important. The Tula razryad,
which had existed from the sixteenth century, was reformed in 1663 into
the razryad of Belgorod, in accordance with the extension of the frontier
southwards. Razryady were established at an early date in Siberia, and
the war with Poland and Sweden brought about their institution in
Smolensk, Novgorod, and Sevsk (1654, 1655, 1665). Later in the seven-
teenth century they were also introduced into the central districts of the
country (Moscow, Vladimir, Tambov, Ryazan’ and Kazan’). This created
the outline of an administrative hierarchy, since the local voivodes were
made subordinate to those of the razryady (or to the chief voivodes) ; but
the system remained anything but uniform: the voivodes were responsible
to various prikazy ; the razryady did not cover the whole country; and
many voivodes still communicated directly with the centre. The problem
of strengthening local government whilst maintaining central control
remained a crucial one for Russia, with its vast territory, until recently.
The building up of a centralised, salaried administration and a modern-
ised standing army, and finally the long wars, imposed financial burdens
which the country’s agrarian economy could not carry. Taxation was
assessed according to the sokha, re-established in the 1620’s, a unit which
took account of the area of land possessed or (in the towns) the size of the
homesteads; it varied both according to the quality of the land or the
state of one’s trade, and according to the class of service. In 1646 and
1678 the entire male population was registered — a sign of the importance
attached to manpower, as distinct from ownership of land. From 1679
onwards taxes were levied not upon arable land, but upon each home-
stead. The government raised dues, introduced indirect taxes, issued
regulations and used military force, all of which served to augment
popular discontent. In 1646 the salt-tax was quadrupled, but the fall in
receipts showed that the tax-bearing capacity of the population was
overstrained.
Discontent at the heavy fiscal burdens and the arbitrary methods of the
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evergrowing bureaucracy arose, as was to be expected, in the towns. In
June 1648 Moscow was the scene of violent disturbances lasting several
days, in which the townspeople were joined by the strel'tsy. Several high
officials lost their lives, and the boyar V. I. Morozov, the tsar’s brother-
in-law and tutor, who exercised paramount political influence, had to
give up his post temporarily. Similar revolts against excessive taxation
and the extortion practised by dishonest officials occurred in many other
towns. The immediate causes were varied, and the disturbances remained
local, but the revolt in Pskov in February 1650 represented a political
threat to the government. Linking up with Novgorod, and mobilising the
surrounding countryside in their support, the inhabitants of Pskov for
three months withstood a siege by government troops; their demands
aimed at greater local autonomy.
At the beginning of the Polish war the government provoked a further
crisis by debasing the silver coinage and minting copper coins at a forced
rate of exchange. To make matters worse, the officials did not hinder the
private minting of copper coins. The value of the copper rouble fell, espe-
cially since the government and foreign merchants demanded to be paid in
silver. In 1660 one silver rouble was worth two, but in 1663 fifteen, copper
roubles. In July 1662, after handbills had circulated in Moscow, a revolt
broke out. Popular anger was directed against the highest officials around
the throne and threatened even the tsar himself. The brutality with which
the disturbances were suppressed revealed the government’s helplessness
and undermined its reputation.
The people sought in their usual fashion to escape from the pressure of
the central power by fleeing to the border areas, particularly to the region
of the Don. As the Don Cossacks, formerly free and untrammelled, were
hemmed in by the Turks who, after the Azov affair, had sealed off the
mouth of the Don, the Cossacks raided the area of the lower Volga, in
Muscovite territory. In 1 668 the Cossack leader Stepan Razin embarked
upon a spectacular campaign of plunder, which extended into Persian
territory on the Caspian Sea. In 1670 he turned against Moscow. In
April, with 7000 men, he took Tsaritsyn, in June the well-fortified city of
Astrakhan, in July Saratov and Samara. Some troops went over to
Razin. In September Razin’s advance came to a halt before Simbirsk,
although some of his detachments reached the district of Nizhny
Novgorod; but with the relief of Simbirsk in October by government
forces his aura of invincibility disappeared. In April 1671 Razin was
seized by Cossacks in the Don area, handed over to Moscow and
executed in June. The great threat which the rebellion presented to the
government lay in the fact that Razin’s appearance provoked similar
risings throughout the east of European Russia, from the Donets in the
south to Galich (near Vologda) in the north. Cossacks, fugitive peasants,
unpaid mercenaries, impoverished noblemen, even village priests and non-
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Russian nomads flocked to Razin, whilst local uprisings broke out against
hated landowners and officials. The constant unparalleled pressure exerted
by the State had unleashed a struggle against State authority of any kind.
In his appeals Razin called upon the people to fight for the ‘good tsar’
against the ‘ traitorous ’ boyars, voivodes and officials. His political pro-
gramme was confined to the introduction of the primitive Cossack
administration; it contained no principle which went beyond that of the
existing State. Understandable though this desperate revolt was against
the background of hopeless misery, it was nevertheless anarchic and, com-
pared with the autocracy, retrogressive.
The government attempted to check administrative arbitrariness by
codifying the laws and, especially, judicial procedure. After the Moscow
rising of June 1648 a government commission began to compile a code of
law, which was laid before an assembly ( zemsky sobor) in September and
completed by January 1649. 1 The commission’s draft and the proposals
of the various groups were thoroughly discussed. This code ( ulozheniye ),
the first to be printed (in an edition of 2000 copies), came into force at
once. Its twenty-five chapters contained 967 articles. It was not drafted
according to systematic legal principles, but was a codification of selected
legal traditions to which were added some innovations due to political
expediency. Since the last legal code of 1550 successive tsars had issued a
large number of decrees ( ukazy ) having the force of law, known only to
the relevant prikazy where they were kept. These decrees, the code of 1 550,
the main maxims received from Byzantine law, and the Lithuanian
Statute, a compilation of ancient Russian law with some western elements,
formed the basis of the new code concerning the political and social order
and legal procedure. Mention has already been made of its most im-
portant provisions: the segregation of the service classes, the abolition
of the peasants’ right to leave and to give themselves in pledge, and the
establishment of the Monasteries Office. Apart from these, the ulozheniye
was important on account of the detailed provisions designed to secure
impartial administration of justice, to which 287 articles were devoted, and
because it brought uniformity into existing law and made it more widely
known. It did not contain a definition of legal concepts, nor was it
comprehensive. The absence of a tradition of Roman law and of a class
of lawyers trained in this tradition decisively hindered legal development
in the legislative and administrative spheres.
In particular, there was no definition of the autocracy itself. After the
Time of Troubles the traditional concept of the ruler was revived: he was
the source of all judicial, administrative and political decisions, the owner
of the country and the protector of the Church ; his authority was neither
limited by law nor by the existence of Estates with their own privileges.
As in the sixteenth century, the autocrat remained the embodiment of the
1 For the zemsky sobor, see below, p. 586.
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State; nevertheless, the autocracy did now possess more pronounced
institutional features, which made it more independent of the personality
of the individual ruler. Russia’s disintegration during the Troubles
deepened the traditional view of the autocratic power of the tsar into a
hope for a strong State above the contending factions. The consolidation
of the autocracy gave Russia a firm central authority, but one where
all the political initiative came from the State. The tsar continued to be
assisted in the work of government by a consultative and executive body,
the council (< duma ) of boyars. In 1 668 the council had a membership of
sixty-eight, who were nominated by the tsar for life. Only twenty-six,
however, came from the ancient and important boyar families; most
of them were ‘ new men ’, some of whom did not even belong to the service
nobility. Here, as elsewhere. State service was coming to replace tradi-
tion and birth as the criterion for advancement.
Characteristic of the ‘ restorationist ’ autocratic tendency in Russia’s
internal development was the decline of the national assembly ( zemsky
sobor ). During Michael’s reign it had been convoked relatively frequently,
and it might have developed into a political institution representing Russian
society. But in Alexis’s reign it met only seldom: in 1648-9 to discuss the
ulozheniye, in 1650 to decide the measures to be adopted against Pskov,
and in 1651 and 1653 to discuss policy with regard to Poland and the
Ukraine. The sobor, convoked as required by the tsar, consisted of the
tsar, the council of boyars, the ecclesiastical synod, and deputies elected
by the lower nobility and the towns. No fixed rules existed to determine
the sobor’ s composition or activity. The number of participants varied,
reaching a peak in 1648 with 290 elected deputies; the peasants were not
represented, and neither, in 1650, were the provincial towns. Delibera-
tions were either in common or, as in 1648-9, separate for elected and
ex officio members. The deputies apparently brought no instructions from
their electors; their function was consultative, but could on occasion
assume a legislative character, as in the framing of the ulozheniye or the
decision to annex the Ukraine. The decision always rested with the tsar
and the duma. Without periodicity or definition of election and procedure,
the sobor was unable to represent consistently the interests of individual
social groups, let alone those of the people, against the government —
especially because it was itself part of the sobor. Participation in the
assembly’s deliberations was a duty, not a right. After 1653 the govern-
ment only summoned committees of experts with advisory functions, and
the sobory faded out.
During Alexis’s reign one attempt was in effect made to limit the auto-
cracy — by Patriarch Nikon. The son of a peasant, he gained Alexis’s
favour and rose with astonishing rapidity, becoming metropolitan of
Novgorod in 1648 and four years later, at the age of 47, patriarch. The
young impressionable Alexis at first venerated the strong-willed, zealous
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and eloquent Nikon like a father and accorded him a position similar to
that held by Filaret under his son Michael: he received the title of ‘Great
Sovereign’ ( Velikiy Gosudar), generally reserved for the tsars alone; his
name appeared after that of the tsar in State documents; and it was he
who was given charge of the government in 1654 whilst the tsar was
absent during the Polish campaign. He earned the hatred of churchmen
and laymen alike on account of his limitless ambition, and particularly his
aim of elevating the patriarch above the tsar. When, in July 1658, the tsar
formally deprived him of his title of Sovereign, he withdrew to the
Monastery of the Resurrection near Moscow. Alexis, who approved of
Nikon’s reforming activity, wished to retain him as patriarch, whilst
restricting his authority to purely ecclesiastical matters; but Nikon would
neither recognise any secular limitation upon his ecclesiastical office nor
resign as patriarch. This uncertain situation lasted from 1658 to 1667,
during which time Nikon formulated more clearly his earlier views on the
supremacy of the ecclesiastical over the secular power, the derivation of
the latter from the former, and the separation of Church and State. This
undermined the traditional Russian idea, inherited from the Byzantine
Nomokanon and Epanagoge, of the ruler as protector of the Church and
of ‘ symphony ’ between Church and State. In Russia, as in Byzantium,
there had always been a sharp dividing-line between the spheres of piety
and politics, unlike the West, where faith and action in the world of realities
were inseparably interconnected; but in law the Eastern Church had no
precisely defined dominion within which it was master, as it had evolved
in western Europe during the Middle Ages.
It was not surprising, therefore, that Nikon should be accused of
papism, especially since he recognised the achievements of the papacy in
maintaining its position vis-a-vis secular rulers and, echoing Innocent III,
compared the Church to the sun and the State to the moon, which
obtained its light from the former. In particular he attacked the establish-
ment, by the ulozheniye, of the Monasteries Office, which involved the
subjection of the Church to secular jurisdiction in non-ecclesiastical
matters, and the ban on further land grants to the Church. 1 As early as
February 1660 an ecclesiastical council, attended by Russian prelates only,
declared Nikon to have forfeited his office, but this resolution was not put
into effect. A further Russian council was held in 1 666 ; it paved the way
for an oecumenical council (November-December 1 666), attended by the
patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, representatives of the patriarchs of
Constantinople and Jerusalem, and the metropolitan of Serbia. Nikon
was solemnly deprived of his patriarchal dignities, on the grounds that he
had disrespectfully made baseless charges against the tsar and his council
of boyars, failed to carry out the obligations of his office, and acted in an
un-Christian fashion towards his clergy. The council agreed that the tsar
1 See above, pp. 579, 582, 585.
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could not alter the traditional rights and customs of the Church, but that
the Church was subordinate to him in all secular matters. Thus the
Russian Church was again confined within its traditional spiritual
sphere, and the autocrat assured of his right to participate in deciding
secular matters of the Church.
This council, in a second session (February-June 1667), confirmed
Nikon’s ‘reforms’; these originated in the desire of responsible church-
men, stimulated by the experience of the Troubles, to eliminate the
formalism in religious observance, the ignorance of the clergy, and the
moral degeneration amongst laity, priests and monks. The situation was
particularly acute because the Russian Church was faced, as never before,
by the challenge of other Christian creeds: Protestantism chiefly in the
central districts, as a result of the contact with foreigners from northern
Europe, and Catholicism in the south-western border areas. This gave
rise to doubts amongst the Orthodox themselves : there were Uniates and
sectarians, and the subordination of Kiev to the patriarch of Con-
stantinople had led to a strengthening of Greek influences. With the
establishment of the Moscow patriarchate by the patriarch of Con-
stantinople in 1589, the Muscovite hierarchy could no longer accuse the
Greek Church of betraying Orthodoxy. The uniqueness of Moscow’s
position as the depository of the true faith, the Third Rome, was narrowed
down to the claim that it was the only Sovereign Orthodox State. There
now developed a burning question : how did the idiosyncrasies of theology
and custom that had developed in the Russian Church, since it had
become autocephalous in 1448, stand in relation to the Greek Church?
For the first time the Russian Church, for which tradition had always been
decisive, had to formulate and defend the true faith against Churches with
a stronger theological foundation. All the reformers agreed upon the need
for a more profound attitude to religion and morals; what was in dispute
was whether this should be realised within the framework of the Musco-
vite ecclesiastical tradition or through adaptation to the Greek Church.
The traditionalists put their trust in a renewal from within of the old
Muscovite faith. The Graecophil group thought it essential to go back to
the — as they thought — more ancient, and thus correct, Greek tradition.
But the traditionalists regarded any changes on the Greek model as
innovations, whilst to the Graecophils the preservation of Muscovite
liturgical usages seemed an act of defiance against the oecumenical
Church. Both groups were rooted in tradition. The State supported
assimilation to the traditions of the Greek Church, a prerequisite of
Moscow’s leading position within the Orthodox world, and essential for
the spread of education in Russia which the State sought to promote.
Around Alexis there gathered a group of Graecophil reformers, who
dispatched to the provinces priests distinguished for their piety and strict
morals. Their sharp criticism of the laxity and indiscipline common
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amongst clergy and laity frequently led to persecution. As far as their
theological education was concerned, these priests were simple people
who clung to the Muscovite tradition and thus soon drifted into opposi-
tion to the better-educated Graecophil reformers in Moscow. Already
Patriarch Iosif (1642-51) consciously desired an approximation to
Constantinople, and during his tenure of office scholars were brought to
Moscow from Kiev, then the centre of Orthodox learning. It was the
great contribution of the Ukraine to seventeenth-century Russian history
that, having acquired the elements of religious and secular education
through controversy with the rich literature of Catholics and Uniates, it
transmitted this knowledge to Muscovy and stimulated the establishment
of colleges and the compilation of textbooks, sermons and apologetics. In
1651 Iosif was obliged to resign because he opposed the reformers’
demand for the abolition of polyphony ( mnogoglasie ) in the Muscovite
liturgy, that is, the practice of curtailing the inordinately lengthy liturgy by
reciting the various parts simultaneously. Although Iosif authorised the
abolition of this senseless formality in monasteries, he refused to do so
in ordinary churches, since the length of the liturgy, if recited in full,
would have deterred the church-goers. It was significant that the reformers
sought the sanction of the eastern patriarchs ; Iosif’s place was taken by
Nikon.
Nikon, once a traditionalist, later a member of the group of reformers
at court, now took over the leadership of the Graecophil reform party.
The despotic manner in which he carried out by decree the assimilation of
the Russian Church to the Greek helped to intensify opposition amongst
the traditionalists; but the stubbornness of their resistance can only be
explained by the ritualist character of Muscovite piety and its magic con-
ception of rites — for the absence of any theology had endowed tradition
with sanctity. On the other hand, Nikon was concerned, not with
deepening religious feeling, but with replacing the ritualism of Moscow
with Greek rites which he interpreted in the same formalistic manner
(making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two, as pre-
scribed by the Moscow Council of 1551, singing three hallelujahs instead
of two, reducing the sixteen genuflexions in the Great Lenten prayer to
four, removing the four-pointed Latin cross from communion wafers, and
destroying icons painted in the Latin manner). The faithful were horrified
not only by these and other trivial changes in the rites, but also by the fact
that ancient religious works, chiefly service-books, were repudiated if
they differed from the Greek originals; in 1655 a new liturgy was intro-
duced. Nikon’s reforms were endorsed by the crucial councils of 1666
and 1667, the second of which annulled the decisions of the council of
1551 and excommunicated those who adhered to the old Muscovite rites.
The hierarchy had brought about a schism ( raskol ). The Old Believers
(starovertsy), as they came to be called, were expelled on account of
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differences of ritual, not of dogma. Even after Nikon’s deposition they
were persecuted cruelly by Church and State. Some stoically accepted the
penalties inflicted upon them; others fled into the wilderness or to the
border, or even set fire to their prayer-houses, perishing in the flames.
The most moving literary monument of the Old Believers is the life of the
priest Awakum, the first autobiography in Russian literature, which
depicts vividly the passion of the sufferer wrestling with his soul. The most
notable physical resistance was offered by the monks of the Solovetsky
monastery, who held out against government troops from 1668 to 1676.
In many places the protest of the Old Believers intensified and gave a
religious meaning to social discontent. In their eyes patriarch and tsar
appeared as agents of Antichrist, whose rule had visibly begun. Eschato-
logical tracts were widely distributed, announcing the end of the world.
Indeed, for Russia the end had come of a world rooted in sanctified
tradition.
The ras/col was more than a mere conflict within the Church. Until the
seventeenth century the Church had been the sole intellectual force in
Russia; it had taken over from the Byzantine Church its pure trans-
cendental orientation and its monasticism, though without the comple-
ment of a secular culture based on the heritage of antiquity. The
Russian Church had not attempted to state its faith or explain the outer
world in theoretical terms and had developed neither a theology nor
standards by which to judge the existing historical and political reality.
As a result tradition had become the guiding principle in religious and
secular life. With Russia’s emergence from isolation it became necessary
to define the ancient Russian tradition and to formulate its relationship
to other creeds. Tradition ceased to be accepted blindly and unthinkingly,
and the problem arose of determining what the correct tradition was, and
how it compared with the tradition of the Greeks. The doubts as to the
soundness of the liturgical formula, the heart of the old Russian Church,
dissolved the rigidity of tradition, the conservative principle of life in old
Russia. The raskol thus marked the end of old Russia.
It occurred at a time when Russia was drawn ever more closely into
contact with western Europe, with its superiority in the military, technical
and economic fields, which rested on a theoretical recognition of historical
reality and a relative readiness to accept it. The Russian Church was in no
position either intellectually to digest the fact of western superiority, or
to develop corresponding forces itself. For this reason the government
was forced to accept western instructors and technicians and soon began
to appreciate the need of a secular elementary education. A small
group of educated men in leading political positions believed that the
fruits of western culture could be taken over without damage to the
Orthodox religious outlook. Yet the incompatibility of the traditional old
Russian piety with independent western thought was demonstrated ever
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more frequently from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards by
such phenomena as individual lapses from Orthodoxy, and even flight
abroad. The mass of the people, however, rejected the European influ-
ences fostered by the government and refused to abandon the sanctuary
of religious tradition ; in this respect many shared the attitude of the Old
Believers.
The Church was incapable of blending the values and methods offered
by the West with the native heritage. At a juncture when the historical
evolution compelled Russia to draw comparisons between herself and
western Europe in the sphere of secular culture, instead of merely in the
religious sphere, the spiritual purity of the Russian Church inevitably
revealed itself as a fatal weakness. If the attempt were to be made, in
practice and in theory, to let Russia compete with the West, in the pre-
vailing circumstances this would have to be done by leaning upon the
West; if, on the other hand, the attempt were to be made to maintain
Russia’s traditions by sealing her off from the heretical western world,
this would involve the risk of Russia, owing to her material backwardness,
falling victim to western expansion. This fundamental option produced a
breach in Russian society, between a slowly expanding ruling class which
looked towards the West, and the mass of the people who remained loyal
to their traditions. At the very heart of the period of Russian history
described here lies a feeling of religious insecurity, arising out of the
challenge to tradition and the first contacts with the historically orientated
Christianity of the West. The life of old Russia, self-contained, backward-
looking, and stamped by the Church, broke down under pressure from
the West: the decisive factor in modern Russian history was a continual
interchange and tension between Russia and the West.
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